Tales From This Side

Continued from Part II Taking a cue from my former mouse-friend, I settle my back into the deeply chiseled bark of a cottonwood tree. Having begun its downward slide, the sun seems now to take on a rapid pace, dismissing the long hours it had tenuously held to its blazing pinnacle in the sky. With the change in location, the brilliance of the sun begins to diminish and pitiless, white light gives way to a burnt, orange tone that seeps into the air and landscape. All things take on a softer feeling and scenery once outshined by the sheer strength of the sun now becomes highlighted, almost glowing in this moment of lighted revelry. Facing the sun across the Missouri, my eyes begin to crease and half close as I watch the river. From my perspective it flows in bands, some moving swiftly, some moving slowly, aqueous layer stacked upon layer from shore to shore. Pockets of tanish bubbles float in the separate streams, along with various other flotsam, revealing the different paces a...

Continued from Part I Lazy hours ticked away on an invisible clock, I having long ago shed my watch, without further rodent-related incidents, and the settled torpor brought me back to my summer reading. As the stage silently reset itself, however, a new player, like the previous, entered from stage up . A crashing sound in the canopy above, protracted and increasing in volume, as the sound of a boulder tumbling through underbrush towards us, roused Doug and I from our second bout of river-induced malaise. As suddenly as it had started, it ceased, and we caught each other staring idly at the ground in the space between us, empty as it had been before the ruckus. This, of course, led our gazes upward. Perhaps ten feet off the ground, the lowest hanging collection of light cottonwood branches was swaying rhythmically in a broad, two foot arc, entirely at odds with the lack of prevailing breeze. At first glance it seemed a simple anomaly, but between the twirling, serrated fringed...

Though Montana is the setting for rivers that run through it , the Blackfoot is not the only waterway of note winding through the vast plains of the northern mid-west. The Missouri is famous for hosting Lewis and Clark’s transcontinental voyage, for overwhelming its banks and wreaking havoc on homesteaders, and, more recently, for driving me mad with its muddy, sinkhole-dotted shorelines and the biting insects that love them. There is something greater than my history or theirs’, though, at work on this river. Gazing down the river from its center, it appears to run into infinity as the banks move progressively closer and closer together. Turning around, the same view greets the eyes and one realizes that looking backward is really the same as looking forward on this river, filled with activity that registers only on the small scale, seemingly begging you to look into the water rather than past it. Lewis and Clark were on a mission to find the headwaters of the Missouri, a conclu...

...or Its Raining And I'm Stuck In My Tent And My Foot Hurts Prickly Pear Oh Prickly Pear, Why do you pop up everywhere Upon this river wide and fair? Prickly Pear Cactus out there, Despite my long and gazing stare Your camouflage did bring to bear Your thorn inside my foot. Prickly Pear Oh Prickly Pear, Why did you prick without a care My sandaled foot all pink and bare? Prickly Pear Cactus out there, How river travelers must beware Your angry thorns that bite and tear The hiker’s wayward boot. Prickly Pear OH PRICKLY PEAR! I long to shout and give you scare Enough to make you quit your lair! But I laugh, with glee within, When instead you do prick Jim .

No, not THAT kind! Whether it is frustration-fueled tirades from a year ago or contemplation of health-related considerations today, it seems food is often on my mind. It was with some surprise, then, that the Delancyplace daily email that I got today was so tuned into what I was thinking about. Delancyplace is a daily email service that sends out thoughtful and intriguing quotations from different literary sources each day. Usually they are historically oriented, with the piece's respective authors whining about some historical nonsense, who did what wrong and when, in the vain hope of inciting some sort of social change that, in 4000 years of human history, has utterly failed to materialize. The entry I came upon, though, ran much deeper than the usual fare, though the implications of what was being said was well beyond the author's own realization. He was writing about the first human technology ever, fire, and its immediate impact on food. J.M. Roberts , in his ...