All happening in an explosion


I have dropped my mini-van at the shop for repairs—stuck ignition and failed door lock actuator.  They’ll call with an estimate, but I’ll pay any amount. I know nothing about ignitions and actuators.  On the plus side, I’ve loaded my bike in the back of the van, so my repair bill at least buys me a brisk ride on the marsh trail that connects across town to my neighborhood.  I’m just a quarter mile out when I stop downtown at the riverfront pier—a barge out of St. Louis is stalled in our main channel.  The usual cast gathers—the elderly, depressed, and disoriented, skippers of work, scabs, cads and drifters.  “Engine blew,” says an old codger in a plaid Tam.  I’m too late for the major drama, but can still see a scrim of black smoke drifting upstream.  “Gonna have to tow it.”  He sounds aroused by the prospect but I’m preoccupied noticing the world changing. Late-season and in elapsing, life’s become beautiful—new colors, new depths in the sky as the sun recedes. Makes me feel like trying harder.  Ride on, like the song says. Through the marsh, pumping it toward home. But then I stop again to take pictures with my camera phone of distant sun over the bluffs on the frost-tipped grasses. I’ll make one of these photos my screen-saver, in the hopes that it will remind me of this feeling. I think of stopping at my son’s school, taking him out for lunch. But he’s not little anymore. He’d think something was wrong with me, and he might be right. So I don’t. Stop. Ride on through this interval. Prisms off high water striking at the corner of my eye remind me of space, where light originates, where somewhere a star flares and dies and I imagine hearing the sound like something imploding, far down underwater, and out in a lab, on the international space station, a young scientist registers the moment as data, while imagining a distant prism of light, vanishing like a glimmer on a riverbank near his home. I often think of Chernobyl, and the footage of the abandoned towns, poisoned forever but still overgrown and re-inhabited by wolves. And I imagine piloting the barges, many days out, alone, or with another like me, who wants the attentive work of maneuvering the launch through the channel. It may be genetic, this tendency to project. Easy to become lost in all the instances adrift—dreck in history. At the observation deck built out into open water, I can see the reflection of the bluff-side Aspen grove in its bright fall burn, and also the power lines, and the new electronic billboards along the highway, where the ads rotate for colleges and florists and pediatric care. I decide to pray, and on cue geese run the surface and fly.  Hello. I say thanks for that and hello to my friend Earl, who really loved this river marsh when he was alive. He believed a universe this large, unfolding for so long, was a kind of ecstasy, and within it, no one could be essentially wrong.


    

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