The Cone
I’ve had a day of rewards and challenge. I’m feeling worn… so I decide to treat myself with an ice cream cone from a local shop, The Big Dipper. As the golden light fades slowly into shadows on the city streets around me, I embrace the childlike joy that can only come from devouring an ice cream cone while I take myself on a traipsing walk through a tree-lined Downtown neighborhood.
ADVENTURE ART CLUB | DAY 5 | 9.5
CITY WALK TO THE RIVER
MISSOULA, MT
Wandering. I take in the sights and sounds around me. A neighbor’s beautifully landscaped garden. String lights over porches to converse on in the evenings. Old wooden doors. Cracks in the sidewalk. Red bugs on a green wall. Toddlers riding their strider bikes. A fearless squirrel that scurries up a limb inches from my face resulting in a tiny shock of adrenaline and my helpless laughter.
I see a crow walking along the ground with its wings crossed behind its back, echoing the pose of an old man strolling for exercise, so I toss a few crumbs from my waffle cone onto the pavement for them. The crow is wary of my presence, so I walk on, but soon turn back to find it investigating the gifts. I feel a kinship to this wildling, more than the people I pass on the sidewalk. I, too, am a fan of slow investigation and discovery.
My aimless walking, lick by lick, leads me through a garden park and towards the river trail. Once again, like a homing pigeon, I can’t help myself. To the wilder, unscripted, quiet parts of nature I am drawn, always.
Finishing my ice cream farther down the trail now, I step down some stone stairs built to make access easier to the banks of the Clark Fork River. This is the river that “runs through it” in our town - a fixture in daily life here. This river is, for me, a metaphor for life’s high and low currents, eddies that trap us, obstacles overcome, and peaceful meandering. Metaphor made visible for all to see. It represents the inescapable reality that the wild beauty of life is always present, whether or not we choose to engage.
“Why don’t I ever spend time here?” I think to myself. I forget, sometimes, that I can just….be…places. Adventures don’t have to be so involved, requiring effort. I forget I can bring a book to the riverside and just rest for a while in the sunlight. I forget how lovely life can be when I weave in moments of stillness. Adventures like today’s remind me of this and urge me to make simple pleasures a constant.
I walk along the wild edge of the water slowly, looking for a flat space to sit and draw, and notice tiny roots reaching out from the edge of the earth to the water. These are the farthest limits of the large cottonwood trees directly to my right whose huge trunks shelter and obscure me from the sight of others. Cottonwoods love the water, as do I. Here, their roots, that in the Spring rest in liquid, stand exposed to the air around them. I can see the effect of the water’s current on their limbs, weaving visible lines and textures across their tangled surface. I trace one line across these smooth white limbs with my fingers, following a now visible current of time with my body. Kinship. These scars feel like the visible embodiment of time passing, of battles won, of flow with the inescapable.
Delighting in this sculptural oasis, I take a seat directly on the ground and notice a beam of light illuminating a branch of leaves completely submerged in the water beneath me. A limb from the tree has fallen here and finds itself rooted by two sharp stones in the river’s sediment, swaying. All around the golden limb, tiny minnows drift as well, playing with the headwind of the current. Hundreds of tiny living beings dart in and out among the rocks beneath the surface here at the edges, unseen and thriving, without disturbance. They live in the shallows until they’re big enough to join the larger of their kind in the depths of the middle river. To my left, a family has entered the water, splashing and yelling, disturbing this peace, completely unaware of the hundreds of life forms so close to them. How much do we miss while so absorbed in ourselves? How much is obscured from us by our noise? What could we gain, just by noticing…
I delight in this tiny, quiet scene in the water below me, so I sketch them, slowly. Tiny charcoal marks along the page become baby fish stoically thriving in the current. This sketch becomes a world unseen, briefly noticed for a time and captured, like I hope these fish never will be.
As I draw, I notice the light changing. A dark sky is arriving. I notice the almost imperceptible shifts in light, temperature, and soundscape. The wind becomes insistent now, and I listen to my mother (Earth)’s warning to leave. Before I step into the city flow once more, I notice a snake skin wedged in a tangled knot at the base of a tree limb near me. I walked right by this earlier.
Pausing here, I notice how the flow of the snakeskin echoes the flow of the water’s current etched on the tree beneath it. Land and water merged. Later on I look closer at the photo that I took to see tiny curving bones along the weaving spine of the snakeskin. I realize that this creature passed here. I wonder what happened... I’m struck by the parallel of the water that sustains all life coupled with the passage of time and death depicted in this fallen body of a snake, left like an offering on a tree limb. As it decays, it sinks into the surface, becoming one and living on in the sinews of another, sheltering life around it. The image sears itself into my heart - another powerful metaphor.
I walk briskly back through the streets now, heeding the warnings of nature to move along or get caught in the coming squall, and reach the shelter of my car well before the rain falls. This adventure started simply with the thrill of a simple treat which led me to the water’s edge and the depths of a deeper contemplation.
Adventures affirm my need to follow intuition and to let my feet lead me to the banks of discovery.
Seek not to question. Choose, instead, to look and listen.
Love & Gratitude,
- Christina
