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oceans away
Copyright © 2000 - Peggy Thayer (click picture to link)
In the middle of the North American continent I walk over the Iowa River and think of the sea, more than a thousand miles away. For years, everyday, every time, I take this two-hundred yard journey, twenty feet above the moving river, I am reminded of the ocean, the Atlantic, that surrounded my island home.
Water. The river's colors are different - dirty greens and browns compared with the full spectrums of blue and black in the sea. The shades are more subtle, more dominated by the land and the season, than the sky. There are no unfathomable depths or horizons that reach beyond belief. The river is finite, more calm than complex. Its life is controlled by shores and transparent shallows. Small waves spit angry foam, wanting more room to grow, unable to join the unchecked wind across the great plains.
Water. It has a universality unequaled by anything on earth. It swells in this small piece of river just as it does in the sea. Ripples resonate in exactly the same patterns on its every surface. It plays clever games with light and pretends to move with the wind. Its every surface covers a single spirit.
The land in the mid-west is so big they call it a sea. It dominates here, limiting the water, directing and subduing it, but there is no compromising of its purpose. The land is anchored, patient, strong, sacrificing the breath of movement for stability. Yet the water plays upon it, eats it up and throws it out, penetrating from above and below without effort. It is the water that decides the boundaries, the limits of the land. It is water that has and will survive forever with its constant change, its ability to adapt, never exact but always meticulous. Ever moving and enduring with ancient strength.
Water. Its infinite, forever and formless, its movement unceasing. Raw and serene. Inevitable. It obeys its own laws, but will bend even them. Consistent, unique, traveling to and through all places on the globe, humoring wind and currents, reluctantly giving way to the land it shapes but can not cover. A single entity, a whole, everywhere. And so I see it in the river as I do in the sea, for nothing can match its movements - the swells, the ripples, the calm so smooth that I want to run my hand over it - the sounds of it on the shore or in a stiff wind, and even more, the silence, believing its potential for wrath, shape, giver of life. What is glanced in one moment is gone forever in the next. What can't be seen will always be there.
I think of my own world, the one that I've built and to which I am a slave. I want stability, like the land. Standing above the water, calm on a Summer day, it occurs to me how small it is. The river humbles me with its solid, steady and timeless movement, coming and going, a small piece of a larger whole, a connectedness which I also lack. My understanding stops with my sight. The rivers is a journey I can never realize, hope to emulate, one of unending perseverance and purpose. Though the water here is gentle and channeled, more fitting of my ordered world, its depths and destinations are beyond feet, beyond me. I can understand that the river below me will enter the sea - that its water rains on the land, feeds the earth, falls from Niagara - but I can't imagine it.
My mind, perhaps more swift than the river, though not as sure and steady, reaches the ocean also. I remember it as boundless, without direction or rule. I think of stability and chaos at the same time. I am awed, I am lost, and I am afraid and fascinated. Like the river it stretches beyond all that I know, all that I am. Where I stand at low tide I will drown at high tide. A mass of mystery and madness, dark even when calm, full of intensity and implication.
I'm in the middle of a mass of land, land that is secure, safe, predictable. In every way the ocean is beyond me. Perhaps the sandy beaches know what it takes to understand, meeting it without complaint on the shore. Like the sea, sand has the qualities so lacking elsewhere. It is the perfect intermediary, shifting and adapting, able to endure and give way at the same time, as much a close relative as a neighbor.
Water. For me it is the ocean, over a thousand miles away. As it carries life and the river carries it, so are my thoughts carried also, through the sky, across the land. Though I can not share the voyage, I too arrive at the ocean.
-Beal Jacobs
All Copyrights Protected, 2000