Inukshuk by the Kaw

If a story has a beginning, middle and end, can a walk be a story?

John and I were walking along the levee on a sunny, not-too-cold, morning in December. We turned to take a steep, rough path down to the river. We had to watch our footing. The gravel was loose. Then we stepped onto a bar of soil and rock and through the weeds where a path had been worn. We kept to the path. Our way soon opened up to the river flowing by and a cairn appeared near the water. John called it an inukshuk, an Inuit word for cairn that means a stone man who points the way.

This man had been built only up to a lower torso of several stones on a large, flat stone joining two squat legs. If we had bent down in the right places, we could have looked through the legs of the inukshuk to cairns that had been built out in the river in shallow water.

The north unit of the Bowersock Hydroelectric Powerplant loomed to our right. Its concrete and steel legs spanned four openings. In each opening, a metal shaft could be seen connecting the turbine down below up to the generator in the building above.

But we were heading downstream. We talked as we went. The river ran somewhat low off to our right, keeping pace with the seasons. If it raised questions, we were not really answering the river. John and I were talking to each other. But we paused now and then.

In not too far, the walking ground became sloped and more difficult and we slowly picked our way back up and across the large irregular limestone boulders to the top of the levee. ‘Good for the heart and the legs,’ John said. ‘Good for the mind,’ I said. We had to be careful of our how we placed our feet on uneven surfaces, keeping our balance over small chasms in which a misstep would have put us at least knee-deep in limestone with a twisted ankle, perhaps.

We continued walking downriver along the top of the levee. Again we came to where a rough gravel path had been laid down the side of the levee. We took it.

This time we came to sandbar hugging the northern bank of the Kaw. The clean sand extended downriver, its surface rippled into moguls, spaced hills of sand as if the river, when running higher, had scooped holes a foot or so deep, depositing the sand on top of regular but a still haphazard patterns of hills. The slopes and surfaces were smooth, the sand soft under our feet. There were tracks. Animal and human.

And then as we walked farther downriver, we saw paths of lines several feet wide running all the way from the scrub wood bank at the base of the levee to the water’s edge. The scratchings seemed not naturally made, but we walked over one combed path after another. I picked up a stalk of a brushy stick, and drew a squiggle in the sand. It seemed similar. But who would have drawn so very many brush strokes from one edge of the sandbar to the other?

Then again, when we had walked as far as we could unless we could have managed the miracle of walking on the ripples of the river, we stopped and looked on to where the river continued running on toward a horizon. Those ripples were only inches high, but we would have quickly been knee-deep and much more had we tried walking on the water’s surface.

We turned and walked casually, keeping to the hills of sand as we could, until we found the path that would take us back to the top of the levee.

John and I turned back toward home. We had not been the first to walk along that way and we would likely not be the last. We had walked somewhere in the middle of a story.