Green River

Early last week I sat in the shade of a cottonwood that leans east towards the sediment tinged flow of Green River, cool in a thin sun cover and bikini, refusing to layer up because this is the closest I'll probably come after a chilly winter in the mountains to lazing on the beach. It's in between seasons in our resort town and that means neither my husband or I are back to work yet, so we went on vacation with some friends in the desert near the town that bears the name of the river that sustains it.

The husbands were out riding dirt bikes and the ladies had just completed the shuttle back to retrieve the truck from our earlier launch in town. We rode stand up paddle boards eight miles from there to our camp, underneath a rail road bridge, in the shadow of I-70, choosing one channel of the braided channels over another, enjoying the landscape, the water's flow and each other's company. My friend's dog is along for the trip, sitting, standing and occasionally leaping into the water, adorned in her doggie life jacket and her fur kinked with wet. Of the three of us, I am the only one who has fallen into the river... three times.

Today we drove down the dirt track that heads through the sandstone remnants of what used to be the sea. The irony: here in this driest of places - with an annual rainfall average of 10" - everything around us reflects millions of years of oceans moving in and out, leaving behind monoliths and ranges, each formed from aggregation and erosion. The wind carves the landscape, as over time it shifts shape and form, and yet we can still see the echos of the arcs of the waves that used to be here, so long ago, when we walk across rock scalloped by the ebbing waters.

This desert is a revelation of evolution. You can see time in frozen slices, the starts and stops of events that appear catastrophic to human eyes, with their limited scope of vision, but these might simply be the equivalent of cells in their expansion, contraction and multiplication. What we see is what we notice, of course, and what I notice is the beauty, the austere perfection of apparent desolation that in fact harbors a surprising quantity and diversity of life, lizards, hawks, globemallow and evening primrose in bloom.

I cannot imagine how any person can believe that the earth is younger than ten thousand years old. Is it because our eyes and minds can see a century at most, and we can't imagine a planet that doesn't contain us? The river flows and in it swim ancient creatures we can only dream about, the river meanders along whatever path it chooses - and we see the evidence of its path through the ages - the river drifts over its bed and it will do so long past two women and a dog have left this plane of existence.

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