Following the River, Wandering to the Sea

The bus rocked me out of another nap, the lurch sent me flying into the window pane, and I knocked my head into the glass. 

It's another overcasted day, and the cumulus clouds (nuvole, in Italian, as I've been told) drag race across the sky. The bus tilts again as we round another corner on a switchback, the railing disappears, and suddenly I'm hanging over a gorge: suspended over half a mountainside. That's one heck of a wakeup call. I catch snatches of a stream: white and furious at some instances, others a small moment of tranquility before the engine shifts and we lumber around the bend. The mountain path followed the little river for over a half hour, and I sat with my eyes glued to the window, following it like a starving paparazzi, waiting for the perfect snapshot. 

I am fascinated by water. It's ebbs, eddies, waves, and ripples stun and awe me. I suck it dry from my camelback, from the carafes and decanters at the restaurants, even the garden hose. Man craves water like a lover. We write songs to praise her. We dance to entice her to fall upon us. We build temples to her. We came upon a Roman temple, built to the god Antas. It is believed that there was once a spring that was believed to heal and cleanse its worshipers. In typical Roman (human) style, they built the hulking mass in the stolen style of the Greeks, and directly on top of a Nuragic shrine. For thousands of years, how many people prayed and begged for a miracle, for guidance? How many stood where I dumbly stood - yawning from my afternoon nap - with a motive and a purpose? How can I even begin to comprehend their humanity, when their lives we so unlike my own? 

The human body is comprised of 60% water. I guess that’s something in common, but I drink so little you can just subtract 15% or so.

The water moves mountains. It cuts away at the hills and shapes ridges and valleys. Every crevice of the mountains has its own river bed, now dry from the early summer heat. How old the stone is here? At Porto Flavia the shale practically crumbled to my touch, like compressed wood or shards of sand. Imagine mining through that. You’d be 15 kinds of dead under the mountain, trapped under the tons of collapsed rock. Luckily the port is carved of clay and limestone. Unluckily for the creators of the port, hydraulic mining wasn’t invented until the 1850s during the California gold rush. Yay chisels and mallets.

An ant moves 50 times its own weight all by itself; the current world record for a dead lift is 1155 lbs, only 4 times that particular human weight. I think of the time it took to create this port, to quarry in to the mountains in search of silver, gold, zinc, and iron. Humanity has moved mountains, in both the good sense and the bad. The abandon town on Ingurtosu sits crumbling atop the mountain, despite an inhabitance of over a thousand a mere 40 years ago. How odd is it to think our stones may still stand, even when we move on and others replace us. I can imagine it now: a valley oak, gnarled and blue-gray, growing skyward in my living room: its brown autumn leaves covering the stained oak floorboards, its roots twisted into our rotting plumbing. I wonder, if you turned down the hall and stumbled over the foliage into my old bedroom, if my stuffed bunny Oswald would still be sitting on my bed.

Maybe the force of the blow to my head was enough, or perhaps the engine's rumbling din knocked enough to my nerves cells senseless, and I'm still dreaming. It's hard to believe that everything, between the shallow, turbulent stream to the cavernous boreholes drilled into stone so old it crumbles to touch, exists.