A smallish river

When’s the last time you watched a bird fly?

Not an event to write home about, I don’t suppose.

But what is?

Air and water,

earth and fire.

But unless we took nearly everything for granted, we would be constantly dumbstruck, awestruck - struck.

But we have breaths to take, and on and on, and we really must get on with our lives.

Even so, consider this gull I saw: white, on the smallish side, without a known species name.

He or she – I can’t tell you that detail either – has been flying over a stretch of the Kaw River in front of me for several minutes getting on with her life.

Just off this sandbar, the river appears to move in two directions at once: downstream, in smallish ripples along the far bank, pulled by gravity, and upstream, smallish ripples, pushed in front of the wind.

The gull makes a vigorous flutter with her wings, then drops to the surface of the river for an instant or two, then, with her wings, lifts herself into the air and a flies a few feet farther downstream, where she repeats her motions again, and then, again, she flutters and then drops, only to lift off again. Occasionally she settles onto the river, just floating for a few seconds, but then she is back to her flight.

At some point she lengthens her stroke and wheels around and flies, perhaps 50 yards upstream, then turns, and begins the process again.

This ordinary, smallish gull flew within my field of vision for several minutes, and then she was gone, flying somewhere else.

I sit here on the sandbar, not entirely dumbstruck as evidenced by these words.

But that gull was something to see.

And now between me and the sun, its radience coming through the thinning clouds, the sun, I tell you, is reflected in its brilliance on smallish ripples of the river, which in my aging eyes, spark with rays along skewed points of a compass, spikes of stabbing light, faster than my brain can record, a cluster of them drifting down near the far bank, and then nearer to me, more scattered, they appear to be pushed upstream by the wind.

Larger gulls wheel over the smallish rapids where the Kaw tumbles a little perhaps a hundred yards upstream.

Maybe I’ll walk over and see.

Sun and sand, wind and water, flying gulls.

Nothing much to write home about.