Wild as a bird in flight, this is my river.
One road of dancing light, rolling to the sea.
Sam Polo
It's raining today; it's been raining steadily all afternoon. I went to the post office late in the day, and noticed a little stream of water flowing down our driveway.
I grew up on the West Coast, and have always loved the ocean, and ever since I moved to the Midwest, I've liked thinking of being connected to my former home by water. Follow the small stream down our driveway, and it empties into Bull Shoals Lake. Twenty five miles down lake, that water flows through the dam at Bull Shoals, AR, into the White River, where it travels on to the Mississippi River, and then to the Gulf of Mexico.
From there, to get to my Ocean, the Pacific, the one that still runs through my veins, it could travel through the Panama Canal, or around the southern tip of South America at Cape Horn, and then north to Fort Dick, California, where I grew up.
Alternately, the water might follow the Gulf Stream around Key West and then north up the east coasts of the US and Canada, then west under the ice at the North Pole, and down the west coast, to get to the same place.
So, if I wrote a note and put it in a bottle, corked it and dropped it in the little stream going down our driveway, conceivably, it could end up on the very beach I frequented as a kid.
Or maybe I'd be better off just sending an e-mail.
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