The Life Riparian

Yesterday we spent the whole day playing in a mountain stream. We've had a chance to play in such streams more this summer, and consequently it has made me feel a homesickness I haven't felt for a long time. I grew up in a small town surrounded by mountainous wilderness to the north, east, and west. A small creek ran through our backyard, and other similar creeks slithered through the manzanita chaparral and the oak and gray pine forests of the foothills where we lived. Even more creeks and rivers flowed out of the great mountain ranges that surrounded our modest riparian home. Swimming in these waterways was what summer was for us, and the dried up ones, like the one that ran behind our house, became passages leading to homes of neighbors and friends.

Playing with my nearly three year-old son on the sandy banks of the creek yesterday, I was overcome with a peculiar emotion. It felt so normal to be there with him, as if we had played there everyday. But we live in a big city, smack dab in the middle of other such cities. Playing in a creek is not a part of our daily life. The creeks and canals and ponds near our house are not the kinds of places you would want to swim unless you wanted to contract a skin disease. Most of the time you aren't supposed to swim in these sorts of inner-city waterways even when they are more inviting. The same goes for the nearby ocean. Most of the coastline nearby is barricaded with barbed-wire fence and armed soldiers in lookouts every so often. There are beaches and other accessible bits of coast, especially massive estuaries, but because most people here do not know how to swim, usually there are lifeguards or some other such people making sure people don't go out too far or enter the water where they are not supposed to.

The creek we played in yesterday runs out a spring on a mountain surrounded by the dense cities of the Seoul metropolitan area. It is actually within walking distance of the subway and a major city center. There are many creeks like this all throughout the region. Small and large mountains dot Seoul and the surrounding cities such that you are always fairly close to springs and lush forest. I used to hike large bottles up the nearby mountain to collect a few days worth of drinking water when I lived in Seoul. Many people do this, actually, and the central government routinely checks the quality of the spring water, which is quite nice!

Yesterday I kept thinking how different the lives of my children are from my own when I was a child. So much of my childhood was spent wandering the woods and creeks nearby. When you are a visitor in such places, especially when your ordinary environment is a concrete jungle, they are kind of enchanting. There is another sense about them, though, and I kept feeling this yesterday, wondering if my kids ever have such a perception---there is some sense of brutality and vulnerability in the wild, and creeks especially seem to embody that. The wild is precarious, and perhaps because creeks change so much throughout the year you get a sense of the precariousness when you spend lots of time in them. And I don't mean just a sense of "danger." It's almost a lonesome feeling that "this is it," that life goes on and that nothing is invulnerable to the brute reality of coexisting in a world; not even the bedrock the creek washes over endlessly.

This feeling I am trying to describe is not an idea about that sense of vulnerability per se. It is so embedded in the "suchness" of the way things are that, at least initially, you don't perceive it as being a thing or an idea, let alone something you can distinguish yourself from. That feeling is a part of you, not something you attribute to the world out there. Maybe in time we avoid that, because we don't want to admit our mortality, or maybe we are made to disbelieve or ignore it because so much of our ordinary activity distracts us from these sorts of common experience; from that awareness or sense of communion with the world just as it is, inside and out. I see a moss-covered boulder, or an eroded riverbank, or feel the cool damp in the sink of a waterway and feel something in common with them. You can't really place it, because what ever it is, it is pervasive.

Something about being in a creek leads me to think and feel about that, and playing with the kids yesterday, it makes me wonder what they perceive and maybe take for granted about not just being there, but also about being alive. Do you know what it feels like to sink your toes into silt? Have you ever nearly drowned? Or been pinched by a crawdad or snapped by a turtle? Have you ever been out and immersed long enough in a place that you settle into the lull and feel almost frightened by the vastness of time? I don't think cities or any other human habitat are exempt from this. But I think it is easier to overlook, because we see too much of ourselves in human things to appreciate how much there is to them that are un- or extra-human.

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