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Picture-Story - 2007-09-24 01:20:53 We put in at Moss Island behind St. Joe's, in a wild, forgotten area of forest with a mysterious trail; mysterious because I almost never see anyone back there. Someone had cut down my tree on Moss Island, where I spent hours upon hours two and one summer ago, fishing. It was a symbol of the passage of a very individualistic, mostly happy, but at times lonely time of life. I looked at the stump with mixed feelings of remembering two summers ago, when Y. had a crush on someone who proved unavailable, and happiness that I was now coming down to Moss Island accompanied by someone so perfect for me, down to the most idiosyncratic quirks. Someone I seemed to make very happy too, a profoundly rewarding feeling. I reflected that even those lonely days fishing on Moss Island accumulated something into the person who turned out to win Fritz's approval. At the bank at Moss Island are old ropy roots looping out over the water, where the person in the boat hangs on as the other gets in, and then pushes against to cast off and start the new journey. We rowed slowly up to the Dixboro dam (pictured). The river was glassy and serene. We stopped to look at the little waterfall just west of the hospital, flowing down the southern bank through sunlit horsetails and leaves and creating tiny stalagtites of mud. At the dam, we had bread and cheese and our own home-dried fruit, and coffee. Waves radiating from the dam-froth rocked the boat, moored on the island just east of the new Dixboro bridge. The waterfall can be heard from the middle of the river, arising from some hidden spring buried in the woods. Without the river it would stay an unnoticed stream; it becomes musical, and beautiful, by virtue of meeting another body of water. Casting off for a lazy drift downstream, we spotted a fly fisherman (visible as dot in distance beyond bridges) in the distance, wading in the chest-high river. Once we were near, I rowed on the opposite side of the river, but he decided to turn around and cast towards us, which made me cling the shore more and, flustered, get briefly tangled in a snag. Mr. Fly Fisherman watched us pass in a crusty manner. We were glad to get out of range and resume a lazy drift. I don't know where Mr. FF put in; it wasn't at the Parker Mill Park entrance, where we'd have seen him while moored at the dam; he just manifested in the distance, where only the dim trail winds near the shore. He might have put in at the bird blind in Parker Mill Park, which is near the river. At any rate, he seemed like a pagan river spirit manifesting out of the mud, silently patrolling his fishy domain alone, and grudgingly letting us pass, without turning me into a crawdad and Fritz into a clam, only because he could see we revered his kingdom. One mystery appeared on the railroad bridge east of Dixboro Bridge. Two 40-ounce beer bottles sat on a bridge-shelf in what looked like an inaccessible spot, near a 7-foot-high ledge on the bridge's central support pillar. This anomaly incited a lively debate on the origin of the mysterious vessels. I thought some young kids had snuck them out by perilously walking out on the side of the bridge, on the ledge whereon the bottles sat, by clinging to the grey pipes above the ledge. As evidence for this thesis I indicated the graffiti on either side of the bridge where it met land, indicating that someone had clambered down at least that far. Fritz offered more elaborate scenarios involving accessing the (cough) seven-foot-high stone pillar via a boat and ropes, a scenario I thought would require too much organization, forethought, and equipment for the kind of person who would drink a 40 on the ledge of a railroad bridge in the middle of nowhere. The mystery remains unsolved. After 40 or possibly 80 (if one person) ounces of beer, the journey back must have been exciting. Especially if a train came rumbling over to rattle the bridge just as one is trying to pick one's way back to the safety of the bank. On the lazy float downstream from the railroad bridge, this incandescent sycamore lazily let go of a few leaves now and then to float down from the immense height they had occupied all summer to twist and tumble and finally fall flat--plok!--on the water surface. Leaves falling in the air give the air volume, as a cathedral's high walls give its inner space vastness. This expanded air-volume lent an expansiveness to the soul of the eye seeing the air filled with fluttering-down leaves against the deep blue. Only one in twenty trees or so showed any color yet, and that slight, like this yellowing tree. One opportunistic vine that seemed only to clamber up into dead trees had turned red. We spotted them all up and down the river, making burgundy shaggy clusters of leaves in dead trees. Past Moss Island and floating downstream, a maple had newly fallen--almost--into the water. Its huge fist of cable-like roots clung, exposed, to the bank, tenaciously supporting the tree above the water, where it made a canopy of sunlit color. We rowed into its umbrella of illuminated branches of stained-glass red, orange, pink, and yellow leaves and marveled at its beauty. It would have been a good moment to compose a haiku. Open-door grace-cage, Further downstream is Lily Pad Inlet, just west of the other railroad bridge that leads to Superior Pond (created by the dam at Peninsular Park). This is a favorite spot of mine. We rowed carefully into the lily pads and looked at the carp writhing and snorting in the shallows, showing their back-fins and tails as they slorped and sucked the pads' undersides. We tried to tempt a carp into view with tiny bits of one piece of leftover bread, but the great grandfather carp must have grumpily told his brethren to stay off. We only saw then at a distance, though Fritz was convinced there was one right behind him that quit slorping every time he quietly turned around to look at it. Lily Pad Inlet has a quiet, slightly mournful air, like Shanghai Prairie on the opposite side of the river, up the bank. It is said Shanghai Prairie is so named for the Chinese who once worked there building the railroad, which Y. finds a tad hard to believe; were there that many Chinese immigrants in the still-nearly-uninhabited Washtenaw County in 1839, when this railroad line came through? But if so, and if some perished here, perhaps their unquiet spirits lend this area its lonely mien. The sun was falling over Lily Pad Inlet as we made ready to go. I was sorry to leave the wild, undisturbed woods and the quiet river. We decided to return every following Sunday for the rest of the fall to document the fall changes. It was a day of lazy lounging, drinking coffee and reading the NYT on the sun-sparkling water, smiles, joy, and wonder.
Yes, it made for a bucolic picture...the turning leaves inspiring thoughts of life's passages, the rippling water conjuring up visions of the stream of Time, the 2 40-ouncers suggesting a Dionysian celebration of and noble toast to life's riches. add your comment: |
