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 at which each is moving. Some days, all I can feel are the quickly moving portions, but today the idle slipstreams have caught my gaze, and as my eyelids threaten further pressure, these slow rivulets seem to coalesce with the faster liquid highways, latching onto them and slowing everything down to a molasses. For a moment, the movie becomes a picture, and as if in agreement with the solemnity, even the robins cease (if ever so briefly) their infinite chatter. For all its stillness, though, the river is yet active. Reduced to a focusless stare, my eyes perceive what the sharp gaze did not. Ripples cut the water’s surface throughout its length, though nothing foreign appears to break the liquid plane. They rise from below, as if pebbles from a mirror-gravity world are being thrown up towards the river’s ceiling. Covered in such effusions, the river seems like it is boiling over, hinting at the turbulence that this now cohesive, opaque, and chocolately liquid sheen disguises.
Fluffs of cotton float through the air in myriad formations, seeds of the aptly named cottonwood tree flying off to new destinies, entirely out of their own control. Whipping through the air, their movements are erratic and unpredictable. Some get caught in the ferocious, upper breezes that assail the treetops and are whisked away instantly, never having had a chance to land in fertile soils beneath. Others bounce through the aerial rapids, careening along the river length in sidelong tornado spirals before unceremoniously being dumped into the water by an errant downdraft, ending their cottonwood experience before it has a chance to begin. A very few seem lucky beyond measure, for despite their inability to travel a chosen course, they are dropped softly into the moist, bank soil in a sunny spot, fortuitously landing in the most ideal of places to grow to full and lofty cottonwood heights.
Amidst them glide long, gossamer strands of silk, catching the same breeze. Attached to each is a minute silk worm, ballooning along the river in an act of extreme sportsmanship that would embarrass even the most athletic human. At first, I pity them for being fated, like the cottonwood spores, to a directionless destiny, drawn on by the careless whims of the changing breeze. My eyes sliver further, however, and I see that such is not the silkworm design. Different worms have cast silken parachutes of different lengths, those with longer ones getting pulled higher into the jet streams, those with shorter strands floating lower. Acting as wind-blown buffers, the silkworms’ threads absorb the violence of the breeze, making the worms’ flight gentle, even controlled, despite the catapulting cottonwood seeds about them. Soaring along the river line, they pick individual paths through the mindless, emotionless, fluffy asteroids that threaten to snag their lines and, tossing them from their lofty heights, drag them down into the consuming forces of the Missouri.
I spy a silkworm on the edge of a leaf, mere feet from my face. He is holding onto the leaf steadfastly with his powerful front limbs, seemingly unwilling to release the grasp on his cottonwood home. Behind him, however, flies a waving band of silk, neither long as the longest nor short as the shortest of the many already in flight. Over the course of what seems like an hour, I watch it slowly grow a half-inch longer. Perhaps forty inches in total length, I think of how long it must have taken him to prepare his aircraft. Surely, with reflection on the short lifespan he is granted, it must have been for him the consuming task of his adolescence. As I watch the sun glint off his lifeline, whipping furiously in the breeze, the silkworm seems suddenly to get his nerve, as if waking from slumber, and releases his clutch on the leaf. Like a bolt, almost instantaneously, he disappears into the wind, sending back sun-reflected glimmers from his silk until, finally, my eyes still unfocusedly dead forward, he travels beyond the periphery and from this world, from this view, is gone. My gaze thins further as my eyes taper to slivers embedded in prairie-tanned skin. The sun is going down, or perhaps it is merely my eyes finally closing. In spite of the encroaching darkness I feel none of the finality, none of the conclusion, normally attached to sunsets. In fact, my face is warm and I wonder if there is sunlight reflecting off the contours of my face, glimmering towards the river, waving in the breeze.
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