If I am to write more about those impromptu rivers, how do I describe the energy of water rushing and churning where it doesn’t belong? I don’t have a good answer for that. One of the problems I face when writing about nature is that not only do I want to convey the beauty of what I saw, but how it made me feel. It’s perfectly normal to believe that I’m the first to drive west on Country Road 9 on Spring Thaw Day and be utterly beguiled by the water’s journey, so therefore I must share it with everyone. But here’s the thing: I’m not the first nor the only one to have experienced this. No one wants to read yet another “Oh my god, water is so freaking awesome” essay.
I doubt that adding ‘freaking’ helps explain how, on Spring Thaw Day, the water flows in wide sheets down two sloping fields and merges so that now it’s a rivulet burbling toward the culvert under the road. It shoots out the other side, joins another rivulet so now it’s a stream racing down the ditch and then around someone’s back yard and into a ravine, where it smashes into another stream to become a furious river that foams back through another culvert, passing underneath us to the other side where it finds a flat field and spreads out with relief in a shallow sheet, exhausted from its mad rush to become a lake.
As a farmer and rural resident, I’m immersed in nature. But I struggle to find effective ways to write about it without going all misty-eyed and saccharine. That’s why I’m not quite ready to write about my Spring Thaw Day. Today, three days after our drive to Northfield, it’s a different landscape. Nothing but soggy fields and damp ditches. The water is gone, absorbed by the soil or evaporated into the air or moved on to lower elevations to beguile other lives
I won’t write about this day until I can find a way to share what a gift it was to witness a perfectly normal event that only lasts a few hours.
Perhaps the gift isn’t the water itself, but that Mother Nature has—through numerous rude and insistent invasions into my life—taught me to open my eyes and really see, to capture what others miss when they blink.
5 Responses
I struggle with this so much. Great way to write about it.
Can you send some of that awesome water westwards to Colorado?
You say you are not ready to write your “Awesome Water” essay … but I think you just did.
You did a fabulous job of describing the indescribable, without falling into any of the pits! Congratulations!
That was freakin’ awesome.