River Guide
Consuela Caldwell / Julia Hatch

Memories flow through canyons––
etched grooves, like
vinyl, playing the music of our lives in stone.
We’re following river rats from the past,
with graying stubble, faded clothes, Bus Hatch and
Georgie White’s proclivities of unconventionality.

Wilderness trapper Nathaniel Galloway
guides us through stern first drops,
into elevation’s gravitational pull over hydro downpours.
The ghosts of Denis Julien and Shorty Burton still haunt us.

River currents run in counterpoint,
swirling back eddies;
their lateral and upstream movements,
contradicting the main current’s downstream flow.

Underwater sandbars and boulders
sculpt the river’s surface
into topographic textural patterns,
that reveal their hidden secrets
to those who can read their esoteric meanings.

Slalom runs through steep drops
threaten to capsize and wrap rubber onto boulders,
earning us a place—in The Order of the Warped Oar—
honoring those who tried and almost did.

Canyons resonate subtle frequencies,
vibrating us at the core of our existence
in their cool, calm magnificence––

in ever-changing solar movements
that repeat day after day,
illuminating crimson-orange, gothic-grays,
on canyon walls,
with desert-streaked varnish,
the war paint on stolid-faced Gods.

Trees line the canyon with contrasts of emerald greens––
their shadows elongating towards evening
to cast silhouettes into the night.

Stars streak in slow motion across the heavens,
tugging on the horizon
to drag us into a daybreak of camp coffee,

trips to the groover,
packing tents and gear onto rafts;
a cool morning breeze forecasts an afternoon upstream wind.

We spend days in the moment,
through canyons in a circular flow,
of liquid conscious awareness.