Pilings Point: A place on earth

We began with climate change.  You handed me a glass of iced tea and I said something about plastic straws. And in no time we were half way to the end of human civilization. Then some customers walked through the front door and you turned to take their orders.

I sat there staring out of the window at the cars driving by on Mass Street. Carbon emissions on wheels. Eventually my glass was empty and I walked out the back door.

I turned down the alley, walking on broken asphalt, power lines overhead, dumpsters pushed against brick walls, graffiti and grime all around me. As I walked towards the river, I kept turning the arguments about climate change over and over in my head to no end.

And then I was standing alone on the Kaw River Bridge. And as I looked out over the river towards the horizon, I suddenly realized that it wasn’t climate change that I wanted to talk about. Not humanity. Not the planet.

All that I really wanted was to simply walk along river with you. We might talk about the sky. Or the earth. Or the trees along the levee.  We might talk about the river rolling along to the sea. Or we might talk about nothing at all. Just walk.

I am old. You are young. I am the past. You are the future. But what do I know that is worth the telling? I would rather just show you one place on earth that I care about.

There’s a place along the Kaw River I call Pilings Point. It’s not far. About a half-mile downstream along the levee trail from the bridge. At a gravel cut through the large limestone boulders that line the inside of the levee we would half-slide down to a lightly traveled path. The path would take us through a fringe of river bottom forest to a muddy ravine. Sometimes there’s a trickle of water in the bottom, but it’s not difficult to jump from one side to the other. And then, the river would be before us.

Pilings Point is just a small point of rock jutting out into the Kaw River. The stumps of the pilings from a long gone railroad bridge march down into the water. You can look downstream to where the river bends behind the trees on the near bank. Upstream you can see the bridge back in the distance. The city is hidden behind the far bank. Pilings Point becomes, for me, a world all its own.  

As places go, Pilings Point is not particularly picturesque. There’s trash scattered here and there, washed down from upstream or tossed aside by people who have been here before. You have to step over lengths of rusted steel cable tangled among the rocks. Just a little farther downstream, on the far bank, you can see large slabs of broken concrete, dumped down the bank to keep the river from carving the soil away. You can still hear the faint sounds of cars driving back and forth across the bridge. And the Kaw River itself is hardly pristine, the water laden with eroded farmland and chemicals.

But the quite evident wastefulness and lack of respect for the natural world is simply not what matters to me. Of course, I see the garbage. I am aware of the toxic chemicals in the water. And I know very well how the Kaw is far from being a wild prairie river it once was. The Kaw River has been both tamed and despoiled.

But when I walk to Pilings Point, I come to see the river, not the desecration. I watch the sun sparking off the ripples on the water. Sometimes piles of puffy clouds drift by. Sometimes the skies are gray. I listen to the wind. I feel it against my face. I see gulls flying. I walk along the edge of the river, sand shifting under my feet. I can crouch down by the river and feel the water flowing through my fingers. And the river always rolls on by, sometimes faster, sometimes slower. Pilings Point is a place on earth. I come to witness the evident beauty - and the wonder.

This is what I want you to know. Over time, as I come to Pilings Point, engaging my senses, this particular stretch of river has become a place where I belong. The river in this singular place still lives. You can breathe the spirit of the river into your soul.

I believe that a person enters into a place. You go to a place - watching, listening, touching. It is a matter of some time, of repetition. A place doesn’t belong to you, rather, in attending, one day you discover that you belong in that place.

So if I could, I would take you to Pilings Point. You would see for yourself what there is to see.

And maybe this is all it would be. Just a walk. Some trees. Rocks. A river. The sky above and the earth below.

Or maybe it would be more. We might walk away from Pilings Point caring a little more about a place on the earth and about each other.

And that is where everything begins.