the illinois river

“for everyday I work on the Illinois River get half a day off with pay, all day long I’m makin’ up barges, on a long, hot, summer day” – Sara Watkins

It came to me today, returned like a forgotten friend.  We drove west into the hill country, backwards in time and scope.  Parked on the gravel stretch beside the highway, cars zooming round the curve at 60 mph’s plus some, zooming by in big whoosh whooshes.  Hiked a narrow trail through a corridor of trees parallel to the highway.  Headbands loose t-shirts swim-shorts and water sandals.  Weary.  Rejuvenated by a sudden afternoon off, afternoon to explore, afternoon to finally put hard hard money at work, afternoon to free.  And amid the sweltering heat were a-brewing storms, like premonitory things; and perhaps not so coincidentally.  The hazy sky cast sun-shadows on rock and river.  Could’ve been dusk, could’ve been dawn. Waded knee-deep through the low draught-ridden creek.  There for an hour or four, and all the while the feeling setting in – like sun sets into skin slowly darkening reddening hardening. Waded out to mid-stream empty-handed as the day I arrived.  Waded out to mid-stream stood grounded on slippery underwater wet-smooth rocks; stood there in the rushing, amid the dash wooshing and river washing.  And then, myriad rain-drops in a chaos pattern of returning home in quiet splashes.  And only the sound of what is.  And then, slightly bending knees and torso, deliberately dipped cupped hands half into water, and paused motionless, entrenched as a stock-still tree-trunk, and watched the river change it’s course to accommodate calloused, creative, potentially great only commonplace, above all owned, above all borrowed, hands.  Saw the immense potential of the natural standing order of things; saw you in his natural habitat, and land in hers; saw the ocean of the sea and the ocean of the sky, the two combined; saw the great cycle of water life gone and lost rush, and finally, saw myself, citizen of only the earth, a creek toward a stream toward a river leading upwards to higher sources, and so on – saw brilliant impermanence, free rushing saved away timeless now.  And smiled, realizing it had been a good while.