1 mile
river road, north/32nd/edmund, south
57 degrees
Even though I ran on Saturday and Sunday, it’s beautiful this morning, so I decided to go out for a quick run. Wow! The floodplain forest was almost all golden. And it was warm enough to wear shorts! The mile was easy, relaxed — my average heart rate = 137. I recited my favorite Halloween poem in my head — A Rhyme for Halloween — and tried to think about the latest section of my haunts poem. It’s about restlessness and water and control and the idea of enough and the army corps of engineers and locks and dams and hydroelectric power and energy and constant movement and . . . . Did I have any helpful thoughts? I can’t remember. Did I look at the river? I can’t remember that either. I think my view of it was still blocked. All I saw was open air.
The air over a gorge is different than the air over a field. Why? Sometimes when I’m being driven* on the river road and I can see the air but not the river, I think about this question. If I were seeing this for the first time and didn’t know anything about it, would I still be able to tell the air I could see was over a gorge and not a big open field? What’s different?
*usually I write driving and not being driven, but I don’t drive anymore because of my vision. I haven’t driven in 3 years and only briefly. I haven’t driven regularly in at least 5 years.
I was feeling good as I walked back through the neighborhood, happy to be outside, and then it happened. No warning, out of the blue: my kneecap briefly slid out of its groove. It went back in right away, but not before reminding me that it could do it again whenever it wanted. I recovered and wasn’t too anxious, but was cautious with every step, wondering if it would happen again. Sigh. One reassurance: while these slips and slides are still disruptive, they don’t bother me nearly as much as they used to. I will be fine, my knee will be fine.
water, preliminary thoughts
I mentioned above that I’m working on a new section of my haunts poem. It’s about water and restlessness. Before my run, I was free-writing about it: relentless, obsession, wearing down, transforming, constantly moving, never still.
Then I wrote this: the falls never stopped, just put on hold, all that restless energy built up. This is a reference to the fact that the falls didn’t run out of rock and peter out, but was stopped by a concrete apron under the water, built over 100 years ago. I can’t quite remember the details, so I better review the history.
My notes continue: dammed, locks and dam, hydroelectric power, tamed, removing the dam, letting water flow freely. Then I remembered reading about efforts to restore creeks and streams that have been buried in concrete as cities built up. It’s called daylighting. Yes! I could include something about that, too!
For some time, people and organizations (like Friends of the Mississippi River) have been advocating for removing some of the locks and dams (there are 3) and restoring the river. Here’s a description that I might like to use in my poem:
The Mississippi River, one of the most iconic, important waterways in the world, is also one of the most altered. Dams drown once-vibrant rapids, levees stop the river’s meander, and dredging and river-training structures keep the Mississippi locked into a prescribed path.
Restore the River
I’m particularly interested in the river-training bit and the efforts to lock the river into a prescribed path. To contrast this, I might also want to include my work/thinking around seeps and springs and their ability to leak and find ways through rock and asphalt.
Whew! I’ll need to edit and whittle it down to something manageable, but it’s fun to let the ideas take me wherever I want to go — to flow freely, not be locked in a certain path!
Thinking about all of these ideas, I was reminded of how the poet Wang Ping describes restoring the dam in their poem, And the Old Man Speaks of Paradise:
Do not dam me. To move freely is to evolve is to live
Lock feeds fear feeds hate feeds violence to the base of paradise
added a few minutes later: I love Tim Walz and I love this interview he did while running:
When he said, about Minnesotans, “we run in the winter,” I yelled out to the screen and the empty room, Yes!