Frolicking horse and rider at the “Big Eddy” on the Spokane River west of Spokane
An overdue visit to the flowing miracle of mid-summer
Yesterday was a really good day. I don’t yet know when I’ll be able to drive again, nor exactly when I’ll be able to swim again. August perhaps. To be sure, these are small desires in the scheme of things but it’s also true that we all have routines and rhythms in our lives that sustain and sharpen us. My typically daily swims in the Spokane River, often with native red-band trout, slosh in that category.
Knowing how much I miss being in wild water, a dear friend picked me up late yesterday afternoon and drove us to the west, toward Seven Mile on the Spokane River, to a place bustling with swimmers, paddle-boarders, floaters, kayakers and one young girl with a fishing pole. It was 94 degrees in the parking area but tempered by a water-cooled breeze coming off the water.
I wore long pants to hide the long and still-healing incision on my knee but I also wore sandals so I could dip my toes in the river. Which I did. Just for a minute or two. Bliss. Then we got back in his car and drove a few more miles to have dinner with my cousin and 92 year-old aunt out at Nine Mile. What a great way to drown a case of cabin fever with laughter and stories, wine and great food, much of it fresh from my aunt’s garden.
I am going out Friday evening, too, and if you’re in and around Spokane you’re invited to come see me and some of my water works at the Liberty Gallery inside Auntie’s Bookstore at Fourth & Washington. I’ll be there, along with several other nature photographers as part the gallery’s “Natural Focus” exhibit and sale, from 5 to 8 p.m.
These are the three water prints I selected for the event. The stars of these photos are Ice Age Flood cobbles (naturally delivered from Idaho, Montana and British Columbia) that reside in the sunlit shallows of the river.
Whence it Came
Who Knows Where We’ve Been
The Nursery
I’ll also have copies of my most recent book, Beautiful Wounds, on sale for $35 a pop. It is hard cover and features more than 100 photographs.
Hope to see you there, and if you can’t make it, consider taking a jump in river or even an alpine lake for me. I can live on vicarious adventures at least until I get my bicycle and fins back.
Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to The Daily Rhubarb at the link above.
Some other of my other Waterworks favorites from the Rhubarb Skies collections here and here.
Bubbles to the sky
The Cosmos
Oscar & company
Crawfish cinema
—tjc
