Where Still and Running Waters Meet
Thoreau opens his first novel, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, with a discussion of the Native American name for the Concord River – Musketaquid, meaning grass-ground river. While the names of natural features given by white settlers were almost always derived from those who “discovered” them, Native American names were commonly based more on essential features of the place, on the spirit of the landscape. The water that ran through the place I have been visiting was not so badly named as Flint’s Pond, but I still thought that the name could be improved upon. If you look on a map, you would see that Chuckanut Creek is the name applied to the water that runs through Arroyo Park, named so for the mountains that it flows down from. Chuckanut is a Native word meaning “long beach far from a narrow entrance”, so while it is still technically a Native American name, I don’t think that the name really fits the essential qualities of the place. On this fifth trip to my place in the woods, I came up with a new name for it based on my experiences there and on the natural features – Where Still and Running Waters Meet – and although I don’t have a Native word to represent this, I believe that this name more truly represents the place in the Native American spirit. I brought a companion again on this trip, my roommate Tyler, but we had a very different experience than I had with my first companion. I came into awareness of a convergence of still and running waters both outside of myself and within Tyler and I, and this further elucidated aspects of my communion with the place.
As I first approached the pond this time, from a distance it appeared to again be covered with water bugs dancing across the surface. I thought to myself that it was interestingly cyclical that, on this final trip, the ever-changing pond would have returned to the state I found it in on my first visit. When I got closer, however, I realized that the pond had in fact undergone a sort of physical paradigm shift. What had seemed like buzzing insects from afar turned out to be hundreds of little bubbles stopped in time within the now completely frozen pond. The icy depths held a new blackness yet unseen in my preceding visits, and the reflection cast in the surface had taken on a new degree of distortion. I knocked my hand against the hard surface and it sounded strong and solid, like I was knocking on a thick wooden door. Although the pond seemed completely frozen solid, I resisted the temptation to walk out into the middle of it.
Branches, jostled from their trees, lay along the top of the pond; they must have fallen after the freezing temperatures moved in. Decaying leaves surround the fallen branches, giving the impression that the branches radiate auras of copper, red, and brown hues. The glowing warmth seeming to emanate from the branches provides a stark contrast to their cold lifelessness. Curiously, some fallen branches have been lifted away and removed from the surface of the pond, leaving only fossil-like imprints in the ice. These imprints looked remarkably like they could have been footprints left by a giant duck waddling across the water. Some branches reach up out of the ice, half submerged and half exposed, appearing to be miniature trees growing up out of deep black soil. A few trees that have grown along the shore of the pond were apparently caught dipping their branches down into the water, seized by the freezing black abyss. Branches seemed to by reaching in all directions, whether up out of the pond or down into it. Tyler was restless and so we couldn’t stay by the pond for long; we soon made our way over towards the river.
The water level in the river had continued its trend of getting higher on each visit. Islands of ice had formed around the gravelly ridges of the mound I had jumped to on my second trip, which was now far beyond my reach. These ice islands spawned new swirling eddies and breaks in the flow of the river that generated unfamiliar patterns in the water. The river seemed completely transformed, in a sense a different river all together. On the log-bridge that I had walked across with Lani on my third trip a cluster of icicles had formed. Amid several small icy stalactites, four long skinny ones grew in a copse with a fifth, thicker one slightly removed from the quartet. This arrangement of icicles perfectly resembled an elongated, bony hand reaching out of the log down into the river – yet another embodiment of the reaching motif I had encountered at the pond. Simultaneously, since the icy fingers were clubbed at their dangling fingertips, the icicles also looked like little trees growing up out of floating islands into the outstretched log. The icicles were a milky white color at each end, getting that cloudiness from miniscule bubbles and imperfections much like the bubbles that had appeared to be water bugs in my initial approach to the pond that day. In the middle of each larger icicle there was a translucent, icy blue section about an inch long that bridged between the two cloudy ends.
As I was exploring the space with my companion, I kept trying to engage with him in a dialogue about the space. However, every time I tried to talk to him, he would immediately break off into a rant about how upset he was with his employer. He was clearly carrying an inner turmoil caused by stress from other things going on in his life. This was unsettling to me because, for both myself and the last companion I had brought with me, the space had served as a soothing escape from the troubles of the fast-paced world we had left behind. It had allowed Lani and me to regress to a more childlike state and abandon the hindrances of adulthood in the civilized world. While I was able to find peace and internal stillness out there, Tyler couldn’t calm the raging waters inside of him. His venting of frustrations crescendoed into a climax when we were by the river. With the river roaring loudly in the background Tyler angrily exclaimed, “Fuck! I don’t want to go to work, this is so much better. I don’t want to just get thrown into a highly stressful situation. Fuck! This is just so much better!” It was almost as if the space had had an opposite effect on him from the way it affected me and Lani. He recognized a disconnect between his reality and the beauty and serenity of that place, and this schism was clearly very frustrating for him. Seeing the place as too far removed from his own reality, pangs of jealousy caused him to vent explosively.
During all of Tyler’s disparagement I outwardly tried to be attentive and consoling, but inside my mind was racing as it drew meta-contextual connections. At this place where still and running waters meet, Tyler and I each emulated aspects of either the pond or the river with our own internal states. This synchronicity with the landscape became such a powerful idea in my head that I could not quell its significance. The close proximity of the still and running waters in nature created, in my mind at least, a supernatural (and yet completely natural) atmosphere full of peace and wonder. The juxtaposition of my stillness with Tyler’s inner turmoil, however, created a disharmony instead. I could sense a definite negative energy that he was bringing to the place, preventing me from really getting into the spirit of being fully there as well. This was quite different from the effect my first companion had brought to bear on our trip, and from this I began to realize how truly impactful all that one brings with them into nature can be on their sense of the place.
Tyler brought with him considerable baggage that was weighing him down, preventing him from any sort of transcendental experience. I think he could conceive of some sort of higher quality in that place, but he felt that he had other things going on in his life that were preventing him from coming into it. And because I had brought him with me into the place, those things were indirectly weighing down on me as well, affecting my interactions with and sense of the place. I began to see how strongly one’s psychological and emotional schemata can alter their perception as the reality of the place became warped and diluted by Tyler’s energy. Not only did this cause me to further question the reliability of my sense of place, it also showed me how fundamentally crucial it is for people to remove themselves from the stresses of work and traffic and manufactured responsibilities to immerse themselves in a place like this, to bring their own internal raging rivers up alongside a peaceful pond to hopefully glean some of its tranquility.
Reflecting back on all that I have gained from my experiences from just a few short visits to my place in nature, my biggest takeaway is that everyone should engage in this type of exercise. It really brought me into greater understanding of myself, of the world around me, and of my interaction with that world. While this visit seemed to be somewhat jarring for Tyler, I think that subsequent visits would help him ease into a more peaceful dialogue with the space and move away from his lamentations of stress and disjunction. This type of writing, which combines objective observation with epistemological contemplation, is very much in the vein of Thoreau’s style of writing. I don’t think that it is just “outdoor writing”, but actually an exercise in coming closer to our roots and the fundamental qualities of our existence. Each visit peeled away new layers of preconceptions that come with being a “civilized” person, allowing that which is essentially me and essentially human to rise up from deep inside. At the place where still and running waters meet, not only did I find new facets of nature that I had never before witnessed, I also found a little bit more of myself.
As I first approached the pond this time, from a distance it appeared to again be covered with water bugs dancing across the surface. I thought to myself that it was interestingly cyclical that, on this final trip, the ever-changing pond would have returned to the state I found it in on my first visit. When I got closer, however, I realized that the pond had in fact undergone a sort of physical paradigm shift. What had seemed like buzzing insects from afar turned out to be hundreds of little bubbles stopped in time within the now completely frozen pond. The icy depths held a new blackness yet unseen in my preceding visits, and the reflection cast in the surface had taken on a new degree of distortion. I knocked my hand against the hard surface and it sounded strong and solid, like I was knocking on a thick wooden door. Although the pond seemed completely frozen solid, I resisted the temptation to walk out into the middle of it.
Branches, jostled from their trees, lay along the top of the pond; they must have fallen after the freezing temperatures moved in. Decaying leaves surround the fallen branches, giving the impression that the branches radiate auras of copper, red, and brown hues. The glowing warmth seeming to emanate from the branches provides a stark contrast to their cold lifelessness. Curiously, some fallen branches have been lifted away and removed from the surface of the pond, leaving only fossil-like imprints in the ice. These imprints looked remarkably like they could have been footprints left by a giant duck waddling across the water. Some branches reach up out of the ice, half submerged and half exposed, appearing to be miniature trees growing up out of deep black soil. A few trees that have grown along the shore of the pond were apparently caught dipping their branches down into the water, seized by the freezing black abyss. Branches seemed to by reaching in all directions, whether up out of the pond or down into it. Tyler was restless and so we couldn’t stay by the pond for long; we soon made our way over towards the river.
The water level in the river had continued its trend of getting higher on each visit. Islands of ice had formed around the gravelly ridges of the mound I had jumped to on my second trip, which was now far beyond my reach. These ice islands spawned new swirling eddies and breaks in the flow of the river that generated unfamiliar patterns in the water. The river seemed completely transformed, in a sense a different river all together. On the log-bridge that I had walked across with Lani on my third trip a cluster of icicles had formed. Amid several small icy stalactites, four long skinny ones grew in a copse with a fifth, thicker one slightly removed from the quartet. This arrangement of icicles perfectly resembled an elongated, bony hand reaching out of the log down into the river – yet another embodiment of the reaching motif I had encountered at the pond. Simultaneously, since the icy fingers were clubbed at their dangling fingertips, the icicles also looked like little trees growing up out of floating islands into the outstretched log. The icicles were a milky white color at each end, getting that cloudiness from miniscule bubbles and imperfections much like the bubbles that had appeared to be water bugs in my initial approach to the pond that day. In the middle of each larger icicle there was a translucent, icy blue section about an inch long that bridged between the two cloudy ends.
As I was exploring the space with my companion, I kept trying to engage with him in a dialogue about the space. However, every time I tried to talk to him, he would immediately break off into a rant about how upset he was with his employer. He was clearly carrying an inner turmoil caused by stress from other things going on in his life. This was unsettling to me because, for both myself and the last companion I had brought with me, the space had served as a soothing escape from the troubles of the fast-paced world we had left behind. It had allowed Lani and me to regress to a more childlike state and abandon the hindrances of adulthood in the civilized world. While I was able to find peace and internal stillness out there, Tyler couldn’t calm the raging waters inside of him. His venting of frustrations crescendoed into a climax when we were by the river. With the river roaring loudly in the background Tyler angrily exclaimed, “Fuck! I don’t want to go to work, this is so much better. I don’t want to just get thrown into a highly stressful situation. Fuck! This is just so much better!” It was almost as if the space had had an opposite effect on him from the way it affected me and Lani. He recognized a disconnect between his reality and the beauty and serenity of that place, and this schism was clearly very frustrating for him. Seeing the place as too far removed from his own reality, pangs of jealousy caused him to vent explosively.
During all of Tyler’s disparagement I outwardly tried to be attentive and consoling, but inside my mind was racing as it drew meta-contextual connections. At this place where still and running waters meet, Tyler and I each emulated aspects of either the pond or the river with our own internal states. This synchronicity with the landscape became such a powerful idea in my head that I could not quell its significance. The close proximity of the still and running waters in nature created, in my mind at least, a supernatural (and yet completely natural) atmosphere full of peace and wonder. The juxtaposition of my stillness with Tyler’s inner turmoil, however, created a disharmony instead. I could sense a definite negative energy that he was bringing to the place, preventing me from really getting into the spirit of being fully there as well. This was quite different from the effect my first companion had brought to bear on our trip, and from this I began to realize how truly impactful all that one brings with them into nature can be on their sense of the place.
Tyler brought with him considerable baggage that was weighing him down, preventing him from any sort of transcendental experience. I think he could conceive of some sort of higher quality in that place, but he felt that he had other things going on in his life that were preventing him from coming into it. And because I had brought him with me into the place, those things were indirectly weighing down on me as well, affecting my interactions with and sense of the place. I began to see how strongly one’s psychological and emotional schemata can alter their perception as the reality of the place became warped and diluted by Tyler’s energy. Not only did this cause me to further question the reliability of my sense of place, it also showed me how fundamentally crucial it is for people to remove themselves from the stresses of work and traffic and manufactured responsibilities to immerse themselves in a place like this, to bring their own internal raging rivers up alongside a peaceful pond to hopefully glean some of its tranquility.
Reflecting back on all that I have gained from my experiences from just a few short visits to my place in nature, my biggest takeaway is that everyone should engage in this type of exercise. It really brought me into greater understanding of myself, of the world around me, and of my interaction with that world. While this visit seemed to be somewhat jarring for Tyler, I think that subsequent visits would help him ease into a more peaceful dialogue with the space and move away from his lamentations of stress and disjunction. This type of writing, which combines objective observation with epistemological contemplation, is very much in the vein of Thoreau’s style of writing. I don’t think that it is just “outdoor writing”, but actually an exercise in coming closer to our roots and the fundamental qualities of our existence. Each visit peeled away new layers of preconceptions that come with being a “civilized” person, allowing that which is essentially me and essentially human to rise up from deep inside. At the place where still and running waters meet, not only did I find new facets of nature that I had never before witnessed, I also found a little bit more of myself.