184 The Meadow Ballade: Canoeing Calamus Creek, Nebraska, 1976 Mark Sanders for Kelly and Julie Before the dam, before the lake, the sun sat flush on the east rim of the Sandhills, and the creek blinked at early light. Blackbirds perched in the rushes on cattails and long reeds. The little water, drunk with shimmers, ran clear and narrow between its banks. There were geese and blue heron, the meadowlark’s chime. Cottonwood snowed upon us, and turtles sunned. We had come one last time to watch one last time. We had thought we might stay the progress, see along the creek a rarity to save it from the brink of flood. We had hoped whooping crane or a sandy blowout lush with Indian burial—a culture resurrected to shrink the plan for speedboats and skiers. The brunt of futility was greater than history, deeper than our lives: we were nothing, could make nothing happen. Our ideas blind. We had come one last time to watch one last time. The canoe swam twenty miles, the oars pushed against the sandy bottom, and the creek sprung up and burned in cold, liquid embers, dazzling coals. Breeze in brush hushed in the trills of oriole and finch. How fresh it seemed though it had been this way thousands of years, so much unaltered. We were clichés. We drank beer. We smoked. Reduced to lines of sporadic conversation between long silences, slow passage seemed best. We had come one last time to watch one last time. Now the lake: motor noise, tourists, commerce. The future kinks what eyes see, though eyes still see what it was. And the crime is that three friends could not be so close again, when, enveloped in heat’s thrush, we had come one last time to watch one last time.
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