Paradigms...where shift happens!

Bald eagle on the wing

Last Saturday I was at a friends place down on the Rappahannock River below Port Royal and caught this shot. Benjamin Franklin wanted our national bird to be the wild turkey. So sorry, Mr. Franklin but maybe you should go fly a kite because you were wrong on this and here's why:

Click for larger image

Just can't imagine a turkey wobble-flopping along a couple of feet off the ground having the same effect. That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

Down by the riverside

The thermometer reached well over 90 degrees yesterday on

Portabago Bay, with enough humidity to make whatever the formula for heat index is yield a pretty uncomfortable looking number. We did a little work to pick up after the previous night’s city council victory celebration party but mainly we just worked on cleaning up the left over assortment of very cold bottled beer, listened to the birds and talked about stuff that older guys talk about when they are too worn out from the previous days or nights exertions to do anything but talk.

Ideally there would have been a baseball game on TV but the satellite wasn’t cooperating so that particular piece of summer background buzz was missing. The river was wide and very still, a seemingly immobile expanse of mocha colored water. Silt, imported by last weeks rain will eventually wash on down stream, settling out of the water as the river widens and slows. A peaceful and even a bit mysterious deep olive green will return as it always has for generation after generation of river life.

The Japanese beetle inside the screened gazebo kept climbing the screen, looking for a way out, which it never did find. Smaller summer bugs and spiders and such clung to the outside of the screen, silhouetted against the hazy summer sky, a bug world mirror of kids hangin’ out on a street corner maybe.

If there had been a dog there with us, he would have been laying, stretched out on his side, asleep under the downdraft of the ceiling fan on the shaded and cool brick of the floor, an occasional single thump of its tail signaling whatever dream he was having.

It felt slow. It was wonderfully slow, just the ticket for a southern summer Sunday.

Voices of the Rappahannock

The river has many voices. At her infant headwaters in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains near Chester Gap, she chortles just like a scurry-crawling newborn as she gambols over the rocks.

By the time she reaches the fall line and the Falmouth white water just above Fredericksburg she seems to laugh out loud, passing us here on her way through, bound for Port Royal and Portabago Bay and then to a confluence with the Chesapeake Bay.

Just below the Falmouth bridge, though, she settles into mature and soft spoken adulthood. 

Ultimately the Chesapeake Bay will subsume her flow as it did the mighty
Potomac and these matrons of old Virginia will blend all they bring with them with the Chesapeake's outflow into the Atlantic Ocean.

Perhaps she knows that in another 80 miles she will reach Saluda as an old woman, contentedly  murmuring  memories to herself, memories and wisdom she has gathered on her journey along these history filled banks, preserving her quiet tales of years past in a whispered secret shared with those who still listen to the old ones. Mostly though, she just talks to herself as The Elders often must do. At Saluda she will bequeath 184 miles of memory and a thousand years of wisdom to the bay. 

Southern Summer

I just stepped out on my deck to see how much it has cooled since the sun went down. Our high today was 99.4 and the heat index was 120. Now it's 9:00 PM and the temperature is 91 and the heat index is 114. That's summer time in the south...sporadic heat lightning but no thunder and not even a hint of rain. It's the kind of weather that goes with a front porch, a rocker and the almost inaudible murmur of a wide summer drained river. Even the crickets have slowed down and the dog sleeps with her tongue hanging out.

Where, the hell is the windchill when we need it?