Prompt Entry #3

Intimacy is a tricky concept. At heart, I guess I'm something of a Cartesian: I believe in the immateriality of mind, of soul, of whatever you wish to call what animates us. I can apprehend your body, we can say we know each other well, we can say we share an intimacy. But what we know of each other, what I can know of you is only the physical, the way one body interacts with another. We simply cannot reach past the limits of the physical when we reach out to experience an other. But still, we can feel a closeness to something ephemeral, something we never actually touch, whether it's another mind/soul/whatever, or if it's the beating heart of a special place. For me, that place is the Gallatin, it's east fork just outside of Bozeman, Montana.

It's a river, yes. It isn't private, no. And my experiences there are not all that unique - other people fish the same stretches, hike the same waterline, catch the same fish, and smell the same fragrance of neighboring harvested fields and the savory-sweet odors of sage. Other people know the river well, many better than I ever will; still, my heart carries a fondness for it. There is a stretch in particular I'm picturing: two miles upriver from the bridge at Four Corners. A sandy, rocky swath of grasses and cottonwood trees that divides the river into two different ribbons. During the spring runoff, when the snows in the mountains recede, the waters surge and this whole stretch submerges. One summer a few years back, I weaved my way from one ribbon to the other, heading for a fallen tree that makes a great hiding spot for trout. Cutting across the exposed worn river rocks, brushing aside tall stalks of brohm grasses, I nearly tripped on the remains of a deer. Or what I thought was probably a deer. It was large, maybe even a young elk, reduced to a bleached hip-bone and spine, and nothing else. Its sheer whiteness was surprising, as if some sculptor happened to have left it there in the sand. Surprising, but I had gone there to fish, and the waters were warming rapidly under the sun. I spent a few days camping along that stretch of the river, working the ribbons and small feeder streams before making my way back to the put-in point, a footpath that winds out of a quarry. On my final day, I was cutting back across that swath where the deer/elk/sculpture had been, only by now something new had taken its place. Unbeknown to me, a young couple had come by and lay naked, bodies entwined among the grasses, bright and vibrant under the mid-morning sun. It was a scene out of Anais Nin, but it wasn't mine. Quietly, I left, backing slowly into the brushline, unseen and unnoticed by them.

There's always something sexual about a river like the Gallatin. It has its fits and surges; it births, provides, consumes; it can embrace, can thrill, can ravage; it invites you to lose yourself in it. Dealing with the Gallatin is a game of give and take, and it requires the occasional bit of finesse. But in the end, the Gallatin is simply more-than-human. It behaves (if I can give it that agency) with a cold indifference and insurmountable will. But when I'm there, when I'm immersed in its waters, it is as alive and as human as I am.