September 19, 2015: Inspired by the poetry of Samantha Kolber and Vermont’s Winooski River
Samantha Kolber’s poem, “The River Was The Only Sound, or, Sitting by the Winooski River,” inspired me to take this series of photographs. The Winooski flows into Lake Champlain, traveling through Samantha’s town, Montpelier, and then northwest past my town, Burlington. After taking these photographs, I introduced myself to Samantha via social media, and then had the pleasure of meeting her in real time. (It turns out meeting people via the internet can be a very good thing!) We hope the future brings more collaboration. Thank you for scrolling down through the images and reading the text of her poem in the captions.
There was a time when the river was the only sound.
The rococo river moving swiftly, and also birds moving parallel on invisible, mirrored conveyor belts of current: water below, wings above. Two sides of the same record. Everything in between was filler. All that mattered was the movement of water, the flight of sky animals. //
Then roads were built, and first the clomp clomp and bob of carriages, wheels and hooves, so that it mattered, when
the horses moved. A muscle more powerful than grasses, the horses. Their trots and runs would tell the river what earth felt like from on top of it. That meant something. //
When horses moved, the water running everywhere underneath had to listen. The river listened. With the concentration of a tightrope walker: still and powerful, so that the thumping of hooves synched with the heartbeat of the earth and her creatures. //
Then came motors and trucks — the ones we hear now, at first like a lullaby or a wind, far off until rotating rubber
on metal axel churns its way quickly, passing road signs
and Vermont’s nonexistent billboards. The rumble of trucks a passing drumbeat, but not a drum. If it were a drum, the river would relish the sound. //
The river would like to listen to these beasts that soar like thunder on land — on pavement — but her ears are clogged. Her ears and pores are clogged with soot and silt, the carbon particles that horses or birds never left behind, but these trucks, thought the river, in quiet sententious prayer: they were either really smart — their pollution a gambit to take her out — or really dumb. //
Over time, the river noticed that trucks come in waves, like water, but not like water. Trucks don’t listen. Nor can they smell, as the river smells the petrichor of scrubby earth
rising from her past. Earthen smells replaced now with the rank exhaust of motorization, the motor like a new heartbeat, the newest only sound.