RIVER

This book follows the course of the North Saskatchewan River, which has its origin in a glacier, flows down across the prairies, and ends in what was once a glacial lake at the end of the last Ice Age. I’m interested in the circularity of this flow, from the unknown to the known to the unknown again, of both the river our lives. The river gives us an opportunity to reflect on what remains constant, what passes through us, and what ultimately reaches beyond us to others we may never know.

Archival inkjet prints, accordion binding
5 x 5 x 0.5”

The complete text of the book is underneath the images, below.

RIVER

The river flows as time flows as both have and always will, connecting this place I stand now to other places known and unknown, to other times remembered and yet to come.

I trace its course on the map: this river that once was ice, flowing from distant glaciers high in the mountains, down across the prairies, merging with other rivers, flowing at last into a vast prairie lake which was itself once an ancient glacier, a lake whose water makes its way slowly north, north to the sea.

The river flows for a time opaque with glacial silt, opaque like time, laden with the burdens of its half-remembered past, as if recalling its origins in glacial ice while traveling ever further from them.

I watch the river flowing between its banks. I think of what similarly constrains my own life: the banks I built knowingly and those I made unwittingly and those I was placed between by fate or chance or culture or whatever forces beyond myself determine the course of my life.

And I flow too, yes, until my life has run its course, until what has been me as I have known me ends and dissolves. But until then, watch the river.

I stand on the banks and imagine the waters mingling and merging with all the other waters and lives and times that flow toward their end and become one in the vast and deep and silent sea of time unending that lies beyond this life.