SHADOW SELFIES BY JIM EARL
foot overnight?” We were standing at that very spot. No
wonder the river called me stupid.
Russian poet Arseny Tarkovsky writes:
He kicked off his boots and put
his feet into the water, and the water
began talking to him, not knowing
that he didn’t know its language.
Oregon poet William Stafford writes, probably of the
Willamette, “What the river says, that is what I say.” My
favorite lines about rivers, though, are by T.S. Eliot:
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god — sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyer of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost
forgotten
By the dwellers in cities — ever, however, implacable,
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshipers of the machine, but waiting, watching
and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.
The river is within us.
Riverbank Park
In my year of walking I learned a lot about the park. It
was inaugurated 100 years ago, in July 1914, with music,
dancing, swimming and fireworks. Eugene was recovering
from typhoid and sorely needed what the new park offered:
peaceful, therapeutic trails and vistas on the butte and along
the river below. It was an Olmsted-ian “pleasure ground”
for hikers, swimmers, campers, bicyclists — but especially
in 1914 for walkers like me, who used the park as Olmsted
imagined, for “the proper exercise of the intellectual and
moral forces.”
Fifty-five years later Valley River Center paved over a
big stretch of the north bank; Eugene, shocked, responded
with plans to save the rest. The riverbanks had served as
landfills, junkyards and garbage dumps for decades.
Gradually the city stitched together Skinner Butte, the Rose
Garden, the Maury Jacobs and West Bank Parks, Delta
Ponds, Alton Baker Park and the Whilamut Natural Area;
and now, the Ruth Bascom Riverbank Trail System is
finally complete enough to be experienced as one big park,
half-recreational, half-natural areas. Last year it was named
one of the 10 best city bike trails in America by Bicycling.
com, and I vote it a great walking park, too. There are miles
of beautiful maintained footpaths unknown to bicyclists.
Still, it’s not really a park, it’s a “system.” Much of it is
under city of Eugene Parks and Open Space, but much is
under a crazy quilt of other agencies. I hope someday it
becomes one big official park. In the meantime, the city’s
planning a centenary celebration for this summer.
It’s well worth celebrating. If on a summer day you raft
the 6 miles down the Willamette through Eugene, you’d
hardly know you’re in the middle of a city of 170,000
people. Once upon a time, not that long ago, the river
flowed through cottonwood forests 2 miles wide; today just
two thin lines of these our tallest indigenous trees survive
along its banks, beautiful and graceful, towering over less
majestic oaks and firs, a natural signature for Eugene. In
summer they look like a forest; in winter when they’re
naked, you see how few remain. I hope they never
disappear.
Nature
What else have I learned in my meditative walks along
the riverbank? Hard to say because when I walk I try not to
think. That’s what meditation is, not thinking. My best
hours on the riverbank aren’t spent with words, but looking
and listening. One day I was back on that long, flat rock
with my feet in the water when my cell phone rang. My
daughter, far away, was unhappy; could I help? I told her to
go down to the creek and put her feet in the water. She did,
and the therapy worked. Her friends declared me a wise
dad, but it was only the river speaking.
Wordsworth, who grew up by a river, describes the
effect of its voice:
Didst thou beauteous Stream
Make ceaseless music through the night and day,
Which with its steady cadence tempering
Our human waywardness, composed my thoughts
To more than infant softness, giving me,
Among the fretful dwellings of mankind,
A knowledge, a dim earnest of the calm
Which Nature breathes among the fields and groves?
Much of the time words can’t be helped, at least not in
my case. Sometimes the river flows with words, composing
my thoughts, mostly about Nature and Beauty. On the
subject of Nature, my year in the park led me to four
conclusions. They’re not new ideas, it’s just that I just
finally “got” them.
1. Unlike the human world, Nature has no thoughts,
intentions or desires; it just is.
2. By definition, therefore, it’s perfect.
3. We may love Nature, but it doesn’t love us back.
4. The love you feel for it anyway makes it beautiful.
That the world doesn’t love us, but just is, is a hard
lesson; but sometimes when you’re happy enough to
love it anyway, simply because you’re alive, it seems to
light up and becomes beautiful. Do we love it because
it’s beautiful, or is it beautiful because we love it?
What’s the difference? It’s an illusion that Nature loves
us, but feeling that it does has a therapeutic effect, at
least on me.
Beauty
There’s a term for the kind of beauty one finds in a park:
the picturesque. It was invented in England in the 18th
century as a technique for landscape painting but quickly
became a theory of landscape design itself. Perhaps it’s
superficial, sentimental, aristocratic, but if you take your
easel to the park, you’ll probably put it where the picturesque
tradition leads you. Same with a camera: You look for a
certain kind of light and shadow, contrast, things in groups
and alone, mood, texture, a diagonal, a focal point (not too
close to the center) — painters and photographers have
ideas about “composition,” what makes a picture beautiful.
City parks make it easy, because they’re intentionally
picturesque.
Landscape professionals think of the picturesque as a
middle category between the beautiful and the sublime. A leaf,
a flower, a tree can be beautiful but not picturesque; wilderness,
mountains and vistas can be sublime — overwhelming — but
not in city parks. In our park, vistas from the five bridges do
offer hints of the sublime, though, so I look for pictures in all
three categories. The pictures now cover a year. The only story
in them is the turning of the seasons. That day when my feet
hurt, and I slowed down, and fell in love with the park, and
everything became beautiful — a mythical moment — I
started taking pictures of everything — trees, grasses, rocks,
water, birds, graffiti, reflections, shadows. Later, when I came
to understand the park better, I learned to see it better. When
February came around again, I knew to focus this time on that
thin line of naked cottonwoods, bathed in a pastel late-
afternoon light. Suddenly they had something to say about age,
endurance, dignity.
Well, that’s my therapy. I’m not sure what drove me to
it, but I know what I found. The ancients believed that
beauty’s the presence of a goddess in something. For me,
each photo records a moment when the goddess touched
something, and it brightened; which is to say, I fell in love
with a little piece of Nature in the park. ■
eugeneweekly.com • April 3, 2014
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