Two Good Eyes

February 8, 2013

Continental

I sip my free coffee and munch my free bagel and ponder the benefit of having a friend who works at a hotel. A benefit that is never more useful than when a certain clip on the inside of my door lock wiggles out of place. The end result of this wiggling is that a key inserted into the lock will spin candidly into infinity, oblivious to its initial purpose of engaging the bolt. Upon a midnight return home, this spinning at first baffles, and then frustrates, once the cat starts to mewl and I realize my highly anticipated pasta salad would have to wait.

The morning after this realization I am standing at the edge of the river, waiting to rendezvous with the maintenance man. The willow bushes have smooth, skinny branches, yellow like pencils, splashed against the steel water. Crows glide in to meet two Canadian geese on the bank. The morning is crisp - snow has just kissed the tops of the hills.

It seems to me that there is a sweetness, when the wiggle-able clips in life set free the cogs that keep us turning dependably. There is a pleasure in rolling out a blanket bed on a friend's floor, in waking to the song of a dove (instead of claws in the cat litter), of savoring coffee in an empty lobby. There is peace in idling time on the bike path because I have nothing on me but what I strolled out with last night, nothing to do because the nucleus of my world is shut, and I've realized I am separate from it, from everything but my brain and my hands in my pockets.

As the breeze wakes up the day, I turn and walk quickly homeward. I don't want to be late to have my broken lock repaired, if it was really wrong at all.

The Dancing River

I live on the river that flows to the east and back again. An old tide of hunger and bison, a new tide of semi-trucks and trains that bellow day and night. The river of footsteps and backpack straps, of coffee mugs and pen clicks. The sun streams down through logjammed clouds, the trees pour off the tops of the hills.

My Missoula is a river, forever biased and never still. A river of due dates and desktops, but also a river of light gleaming on the edge of Sentinel, of kingfishers perched on telephone lines, of pigeons chortling under the bridge. A river of day and night relaying the reins. A river of subwoofers and snares and cold gusts from the canyon. My Missoula is on the rocks – it is frothy like the top of a bitter pale ale. My Missoula is dredged up like Caras Park, dark and misplaced, with the water always flowing by. The bridges a parthenon, a girdle, a 100-year corset afraid of the emotion a river can bring.

The river is bound, but the streets are not. The sidewalks, the exhaust, the clicking lighters all overflow their banks, all eddy into the back stoops and corners. Each road is a stream, each house hyporheic, melding the sky and the curving horizon into the hit of our heels and our fervent gaze.

A Salish story goes that Coyote was one day walking when he heard singing women, and presently saw that these women were both naked and dancing, on the waters of a wide, strong river. Coyote was not one to pass up naked dancing women.

Now a city has spread where he dallied on the shining banks. Now the river is cinched with levees, and the floodplains are houses. We built a city here, an image traced from the river's reflection. The human system pacing the river system – the structure, function, and energy flows, just like we learned in our science classes. Its all here, all grown and attached, from the eves to the curbs, in the windows and dead bolts and flashing turn signals, in the cigarette butts that wash from the streets into the dancing water.

Like Coyote we are drawn to the pleasures of this city and this river, of the system we have grown around it. Like him we get caught. Caught by the current that happens the same every time but is never made of the same pieces.