Reading Readiness
As I dip my paddle in and out of the water of the French Broad, I study patterns of light and ripples. The current creates small riffles around the rocks. I stare at these riffles as if they will tell me something I need to know.
It occurs to me that I am learning to read the water, just as I know that sailors can read the sky. Is this what my great-grandmother did so readily the times she crossed the more southern Congaree River, traveling from up country to town in a canoe?
I study the patterns on the surface of the water. Although I have kayaked this river before, this time I find myself needing to pay more attention. The water level is lower, the rocks higher. The wind is up, and rain is falling.
A river is never the same twice, I am thinking. What was a leisurely float down a calm path of water last time is now an exhilarating workout. It’s not especially white water, not exactly, but it’s white enough for me. Am I ready?
“You’re a perceptive person,” I tell myself. “You can figure this out.” I think of journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who popularized a Native American proverb: “Call on God, but row away from the rocks.”
Soon I learn to avoid the patches of water that V out like wings of phantom wet birds. Once I don’t, and my kayak ends up skimming a rock where I use the paddle to push the kayak off and out. It’s not so hard being stuck between a rock and a soft place.
I paddle. Sometimes when I see a stretch of riffles crossing the entire stream, I imagine that I am about to tumble down a fall that is longer than the two-inch drop that is there in front of me. Other times, I let my attention wander and drift some, watching the birds fly from limb to limb on trees that bind the river.
The sun falls differently on water when a rock is closer to the surface. What I see then has no analogy to the alphabet I know, yet perhaps if I do this often enough, spend more time in the water, I will learn all the signs that make up the alphabet of a river.
When I am in a river, I think I want to be in one again, soon. Too much time passes before I find myself back between the pages of a book of water. Although I love the pace of a river, I am caught between living in the moment and trying to make sense of my adventure with the intellectual apparatus that serves me on land.
Now I begin to wonder how my experience reading signs on a river relates to children who are about to start school. Do children who learn to read nature, from three-leafed plants to riffles, glide into books as energetically as I am gliding in my kayak?
I imagine.
Felicia Mitchell. First published in Washington County News (Abingdon, VA), 1 August 2006, p. A4. WCN is a publication of Media General Operations. Copyright 2006.
It occurs to me that I am learning to read the water, just as I know that sailors can read the sky. Is this what my great-grandmother did so readily the times she crossed the more southern Congaree River, traveling from up country to town in a canoe?
I study the patterns on the surface of the water. Although I have kayaked this river before, this time I find myself needing to pay more attention. The water level is lower, the rocks higher. The wind is up, and rain is falling.
A river is never the same twice, I am thinking. What was a leisurely float down a calm path of water last time is now an exhilarating workout. It’s not especially white water, not exactly, but it’s white enough for me. Am I ready?
“You’re a perceptive person,” I tell myself. “You can figure this out.” I think of journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who popularized a Native American proverb: “Call on God, but row away from the rocks.”
Soon I learn to avoid the patches of water that V out like wings of phantom wet birds. Once I don’t, and my kayak ends up skimming a rock where I use the paddle to push the kayak off and out. It’s not so hard being stuck between a rock and a soft place.
I paddle. Sometimes when I see a stretch of riffles crossing the entire stream, I imagine that I am about to tumble down a fall that is longer than the two-inch drop that is there in front of me. Other times, I let my attention wander and drift some, watching the birds fly from limb to limb on trees that bind the river.
The sun falls differently on water when a rock is closer to the surface. What I see then has no analogy to the alphabet I know, yet perhaps if I do this often enough, spend more time in the water, I will learn all the signs that make up the alphabet of a river.
When I am in a river, I think I want to be in one again, soon. Too much time passes before I find myself back between the pages of a book of water. Although I love the pace of a river, I am caught between living in the moment and trying to make sense of my adventure with the intellectual apparatus that serves me on land.
Now I begin to wonder how my experience reading signs on a river relates to children who are about to start school. Do children who learn to read nature, from three-leafed plants to riffles, glide into books as energetically as I am gliding in my kayak?
I imagine.
Felicia Mitchell. First published in Washington County News (Abingdon, VA), 1 August 2006, p. A4. WCN is a publication of Media General Operations. Copyright 2006.
posted by Felicia Mitchell | 6:12 PM
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