Water-Worlds
This morning I revisited a piece I wrote two years ago. The memory of it bubbled to the surface as I looked long at this detail from this recent detail of the creek. And when I had finished revising the little reflection, I decided maybe with a bit of work, it might be suitable for another life elsewhere in print or voice. So for now, I'll excerpt it and hope the last three paragraphs will stand alone sufficiently to accompany this frog's-eye picture of the creek.
...There is a city of structure under my feet here in this very spot, many miles from any city. Carry Mr. Macaulay's lens down a thousand feet below our pasture and look up above at the banks of the headwaters of Goose Creek. Silent and massive over the impervious core of bedrock, a blanket of stone, porous and fractured, stores hurricane and summer storm. Creeks and rivers run there in the dark. Canyons, caves and lakes there are filled with ancient rain--the vast reservoir that bears most of the world's fresh water--the liquid underground water-world we never mind.
Upstream and all along its course, this water-rich rock reaches the surface where we live. The cold subterranean water comes into the light; it trickles and flows from clefts in the side of green hills. Finding each other in lower places, bound by gravity, ribbons of mountain spring water merge and flow together. They cut their way through the very rock from which they were born.
See: this revelation of water that is Goose Creek rushing by. Its vapors in time will rise from sea to cloud to move again over mountains. Rain of a thousand seasons will fill dark dripping vaults below our feet. Deep from these ridges liquid light and sound of creeks will flow, and other pedestrians will stand here unknowing, high above river worlds underground.