Housatonic — I have a friend who’s the poster-child for good sense. But looking outside — his land abuts the Williams River — he saw goldfish rising to the water’s surface before following the current downriver.
Hurrying to the riverbank, he discovered he hadn’t seen fish at all. Instead he was watching bright leaves falling, sinking, before rising to float away.
My friend knows too much of the outdoors for this confusion, but fall’s sensory overload is enough to do and think some strange things.
To make the same mistake on a windy day at Rising Pond might cause a wanderer to see a sea loaded with schools of surfacing fish.
The river, backed up long and black doubles the shoreline color and captures the sky. Clouds of leaves spin and wobble into the slow current and start downstream. Their migration’s thwarted by the dam, these leaves gather in eddies, leach out gray and sink out of sight. My friend’s goldfish in reverse.
Railroad tracks once crossed the water, offering a shortcut home after a hike. The railroad tore up the tracks when they built the new dam. They left only the cement and stone pier. It still stands strong. Though superfluous, it endures, high, dry now, dry, and stolid as a pyramid, and becoming just as much of antiquity.
The water from the north, at first a placid half-mile, quickens as it reaches the dam’s edge, first rippling slightly and bulging with surface tension before bursting over and down.
What was polished slate explodes into a million shards and crashes hissing and foamy before gathering itself and hurrying away.
The wind freshens, pinches the water into peaks and valleys, first shadowing then snow — peaked, again and again along the pond’s length. Trees, blurred, deconstructed, thrash and sway. Sandbars flood, disappear and resurface.
Heading home, leaning into the wind, I wonder how it might be to know the freedom of the wind, and like the leaves, let it carry me wherever it will.
