When I fly, I try to sit by the window. Night or day, the world from the plane is quite interesting, providing perspectives on humanity, the planet, time and space.
Flying over the plains of the US one can see large expanses of regularly shaped farms, straight roads, and lots of flat territory. One time, I was following a river cutting through that order, a meandering river much like the one in the photo here. And, like the one I attached here (alas, I didn’t have decent ones of my own), one could see the history of the river – its current oxbows as it meanders across the flat land; the broken off oxbows, now lakes, where the river once flowed; and evidence in the color and curve of the land of where the river once ran but now covered by a land subdivided in neat little human-understandable chunks.
This got me thinking of places where we have created walls on the sides of rivers (like in practically every European town), of how humans have always tried to force rivers to do their bidding, trying to freeze for all eternity what the rivers unconsciously have been doing for millennia.
And this controlling of the rivers provides a false permanence. The different extent to which the rivers have left their mark on the land, even if we were to try and obliterate them by channels or drainage, shows a permanence of nature’s flow that we are so foolish to think we can stop.
Image from Tim Gage
