The last couple of weeks have been tough. My thoughts have been far away with an old friend who has been in an accident. I have often had to pull my thoughts back to the here-and-now so I can focus on simple tasks. Most of the time, my thoughts are in a distant past with my old friend.
I will be releasing these little audio meditations every other week from now on. For inexplicable reasons, I decided at the last minute that this week’s selection would be new rather than something I’ve been sitting on for a while. So this was recorded on Thursday afternoon while I was walking along the banks of a swollen Clark Fork River near the confluence with the Bitterroot River. This area is known as Kelly’s Island and it’s a place that I have photographed many times. But taking photos and recording audio are not the same. Often when I’ve tried to record in this spot I find the noises of town are just too near and too invasive. This recording is by no means free of extraneous noise, but the jet taking off from Missoula Airport in this recording seemed for some reason to add an element of departure or journey that I could appreciate.
It takes me back to my childhood when I would lie in the grass of our backyard and look up at vapor trails in the blue sky. I imagined all the places the people on those planes we coming from and going to. As happens in dreamy minds like mine, these flights, which were always adventures on a par with Saint-Exupérys flights in the Sahara, were in reality mundane commuter flights from Reno to Omaha or Boise to Oklahoma City traversing a Colorado summer sky.
A daydreamer, you might say: then and now.
I should say that the normal rushing sounds of the river as it fights its way over rocks and deadwood are somewhat muted in this recording because the river this time of year runs high with spring runoff. Much of the rocky ground where I set up and photograph in fall and winter is now submerged under several feet of water. The river looks much wider and more formidable now, but it is also much quieter. The first bit of this recording is mostly the birds in the cottonwoods along the banks. Then the jet takes off and as it does, I turn slowly to the river which you can hear as the jet engines disappear in the distance.
Again, this is a simple field recording of a peaceful place in western Montana in late spring/early summer. May it bring you a moment of welcome solace in which to daydream for yourselves.
A quiet spot near a river...