Walking by the river in February

Yesterday after the arts workshop it was sunny and cold, late afternoon shadows creating sharp contrast against the buildings downtown – black outlines against pale inanimate shapes like the color of human flesh after a winter-long hibernation under clothing. I talked my husband into going for a walk with me. We headed down the bike path near the river. Everything was still naked from winter, trees bare, the brown water’s surface reflecting the sky and shore like a bowl full of mercury. Only the sounds revealed that Spring is on its way.

Above us, pairs of Canada geese honk their chatter to one another. Assorted chirps, quacks, and gurrrumphs from thickets of spiky brambles reveal each creature’s cry for a mate and the search for a nesting place in the bright watery cold. In the water, small groups of ducks gather and start to pair off. One pair of iridescent green mallard heads goes head-to-head in a stand-off like Bighorn sheep. I noticed at least six different varieties of webfoot waterfowl, and some that looked like a cross between wild and domestic varieties.

Mallards are easy to identify. “Make Way for Ducklings” was one of my favorite children’s books, and I read it to my daughter, same as my mother read it to me. There are the Canada Geese of course. One large white goose floats among the wild ones, like the rebel who escaped the barnyard in another children’s book “The Day the Goose got Loose.” I don’t recognize the small black, white-beaked bird that sits on a log with a pair of mallards, but I think it is some kind of duck. When the three jump into the water, the mallards drift smoothly across the surface, but the little black one’s head juts forward and back, like the walking birds that scour grocery store parking lots for morsels of food. With its white beak jerking brightly back and forth against the dark water, it seemed to me that the motion might attract predators from above. But I am not the one who designed this creature or its predators, and so I decided to relax and enjoy the show.

Far across the water, a large dark crane or heron stands alone. Nests of sticks are showing in leafless trees above. They wait for the next generation of these solitary exclamation points that punctuate our waterways in summertime. Ducks and geese slide in circles in the water around the crane, and one gigantic Canada goose poses on a stump nearby. He spreads his wings in a display certain to attract a female desiring strong and healthy offspring. He poses like that for outstretched minutes, so that no girl goose can miss him, and no gander will dare challenge him. Far above in the naked tree branches perches a pair of bald eagles.

The white head of the male flashes in the lowering sunlight, and the large brown female rests on a branch slightly lower, near her mate.

There is so much stillness. The eagles, the crane, the gander with outstretched wings; it feels as if the birds are conserving their energy, their life force, for the burst of life about to be fulfilled in the coming weeks.

Under the vegetation at water’s edge, a pair of nutria burrows in the mud. They turn to dip into the briny water, swimming a bit, diving slowly, coming back up, but never venturing far from the muddy banks. One of them has gray whiskers, making me think of men who cycle the Eugene bike paths with their neatly trimmed gray beards, or pull up next to me in a hybrid Prius or economy sedan, at a stop light when I’m driving home from work. Men who are friends of my husband look like this too. Their short gray beards make them appear wise, like college professors who spend their days behind a typewriter in a wood-paneled office, heavy tomes lining the bookshelves. I have to remind myself that they are probably the same age as I .. and I think about their childhood paralleling mine in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of them look better now than they did as young men, and I wonder if they know it.

Anyway, it’s just a thought, and it will pass. Like the nutria, fulfilling its life’s destiny along a muddy river bank on a cold and clear almost-spring late afternoon in February.