epiphany (ĭ-pif’-uh-nē) n., pl. –nies. 3a. A sudden manifestation of the essence or meaning of something. b. A comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization. (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed., 2009.)
LABOR DAY WEEKEND WAS OVER, thank god. Now that everybody had gone home, a nice long ride was in order. Time to look in on some far-flung corners of my bailiwick. So after finishing up the usual morning chores I caught and saddled Pal and we headed off for Emigrant Pass and points beyond—a long patrol into some gorgeous country up on the Humboldt-Toiyabe/Stanislaus boundary. Another top quality day in the mountains but I’ve already forgotten whatever went down, aside from something well out of the ordinary that happened on our way back to the cabin.
Coming down from Long Lakes, at the foot of that last big grade…feeling pretty pounded after twenty-some miles and eight hours in the saddle, topped off by that last set of switchbacks. With only a couple of miles to go, we pulled up at the river crossing in Lower Piute Meadows. Pal was parched—he hadn’t had a drop all day long (this one absolutely refuses to drink from lakes and ponds) so I dropped his reins, knowing from hard-earned experience that failure to do so would result in them being ripped right out of my hands as soon as the big palomino foxtrotter got two hooves in the water.
Whenever your equine cohort needs rehydrating you’re presented with a golden opportunity to relax and have a look around. (Enjoy the break—this may take a while.) So while Pal slaked his jumbo thirst I sat there in my leather high chair and got lost in the dancing sparkles made by sunlight glancing off the lazy river’s glassy surface, straight into my eyeballs. The miracle of polarized sunglasses allowed me to gaze at this hypnotic spectacle for as long as I wanted without being permanently dazzled. Meanwhile, the upper West Walker was doing what rivers do: taking the watery path of least resistance on a long, downhill slide to its next temporary resting place (in this case, following a brief layover in Topaz Reservoir, fields of alfalfa in Smith Valley, Nevada). Sitting there, I recalled how it looked—and sounded—right here at this very spot back in mosquito-ey June when the river was tearing along, all froth and liquid white-noise.
The Lower Piute ford is flat and free of obstructions—important features, particularly for packers leading strings of mules. (During the spring flood, hidden obstacles can turn a mere stumble into full-blown calamity.) Well over a century ago, Basque sheepherders and their tenders used this crossing. Sheep men supplying mutton to hungry miners during the Aurora and Bodie mining booms were among the earliest horseback visitors to this part of the world but, before their arrival, the Shoshonean peoples whose name these meadows now bear waded across at this exact same spot when the water was high—for millennia. At this time of year, here where the river meanders through a series of pocket meadows, the ford is still fairly broad but only inches deep. Just a little ways up-river, what’s left of the West Walker has already slowed to an almost silent crawl after one final boisterous tumble over an expanse of cobbled bed. Beyond that, farther up-canyon, the river’s gradient dwindles to almost nothing in the span of a few hundred yards. During the spring runoff, it slows incrementally through this stretch and as the river settles down, first boulders then rocks, cobbles, pebbles, gravel, and sand drop out in turn until the sluggish current carries nothing weightier than silt and organic matter—the very reason this string of meadows happens to be where it is in the first place.
The ford has a coarse gravel bottom of mostly small pebbles and DG (decomposed granite)—a coarse mix of quartz and feldspar crystals along with smaller fragments of darker minerals including mica, which reflects sunlight and adds a little bit of sparkle to the scene. By mid-July, when the water has slowed way down and is considerably warmer, algae colonizes the gravelly bottoms. This thin layer of underwater vegetation turns the river bed a hard-to-describe color: sort of a dark-khaki green with orangish-tan undertones. Light reflecting off the bottom creates a false impression that the water itself has taken on this, what some would call, “yucky” color. By the time August rolls around, the upper West Walker is typically little more than a mid-sized creek, kept alive by residual snowfields clinging to cliffs and gullies up on the crest.
Back to the now & here. Low-angle late-summer sunlight slanted into the gently murmuring remnants of what had been a minor torrent just a couple of months before. Me, sitting there on Pal’s back, idly watching the river roll on by with those delightful flickering sunbursts bouncing off the back of my skull. Out of the blue, something else snagged my attention. Actually, two things materialized in my visual field—two separate phenomena, both of them somehow linked to those dancing sparkles. Both had completely escaped notice even though I’d been staring right at them.
Clearly visible on the river’s near-glassy surface was a striking honeycomb pattern consisting of discrete, polygonal “cells.” Roughly six to ten inches in diameter, each one had a slight indentation near its center, like the little dimple you see when a whirlpool is starting to form above a bathtub or sink drain. These isolated bits of swirling current, I could see, were little eddies. Each one was rimmed on all sides with identical rotating cells, all of which were separated by distinct but subtle boundaries. (In other words, they had “edges.”) As it happened, the lighting was perfect and I was able to focus on individual cells as they slowly passed by and saw how some would curl into their neighbors and merge while others divided in two. At the same time, an entire network of stripy shadows shimmied on the orangish-tannish-khaki-colored river bed—an offset mirroring of the eddy-cells’ edges visible on the surface. These criss-crossing lines formed a grid of filamentous shadows of varying widths and shades of gray. (Imagine if you will, shadows cast by an open-meshed fishing net lying on the surface—a net made out of some sort of make-believe multi-strand cordage, each segment simultaneously unraveling and re-raveling while the whole thing undulates in a sensuous, rhythmic manner most pleasing to the eye.)
Moments before, staring at those flickering sunbursts, almost in a trance, my mind was adrift. But this new show had me wide awake and rapt. It so happens that I’ve observed a similar play of wavering shadows on other stream beds without giving them much thought. But on this one particular sunny afternoon I really saw them—really saw them—as if for the first time. (This may have been due to my weariness; I know from experience that fatigue can unlock a part of the brain that lets you see things through a different lens.) There was a lot going on here—things that I’d completely overlooked. A wordless thought appeared in my mind, the gist of which was: Amazing: the countless hours I’ve spent sitting beside streams and rivers…watching them roll by, gazing into their depths. All my years in the mountains, completely unaware of flowing water’s hidden complexities. So much going on in there that we’re not even aware of!
Now, every so often, when some weird or inexplicable natural phenomenon grabs my attention, what I’ve come to call “the inner scientist” suddenly rises up and takes the helm—a hyper-objective, emotionally detached version of Me who observes things with an empirical eye…some nerdy guy who talks inside my head using my voice. (It’s a subtle thing; often, only later will I realize he made one of his appearances and weighed in on something.) It was, in fact, the arrival of the inner scientist that caused regular-me to snap to attention and focus on the various things I was looking at. The following is an account of what inner-science-guy observed:[*]
The presence here of these compartmentalized eddies is owing to the river’s shallowness and its smooth, flat bed. (Deeper, faster-moving water and a rocky bottom would result in a more homogenous mixture of currents.) Water flowing along the bottom is slowed by drag. This draws water from near the surface which in turn creates upwelling currents, initiating localized rotational flow as a means to absorb the drag. Discrete “pods” of swirling water begin to emerge due to the meeting of neighboring currents—currents that are moving at varying speeds or in direct opposition—which causes invisible boundaries to form between adjacent compartments. Meanwhile, down-stream flow (that is, horizontal flow) induces the contents of each pod to begin rotating around a vertical axis, creating an incipient whirlpool—a vortex. Sunlight reflecting off each eddy-pod’s faintly indented, rimmed surface exposes the presence of three things in ceaseless motion: a vortex, the pod’s shifting two-dimensional shape, and its outer edges—all this on a shifting tide of low amplitude waves (the reason why the shadows on the gravelly bottom appear to undulate). And as for those undulating shadows: the darkish, swaying lines are a result of refraction—the bending of light as it enters a new, largely transparent medium. Light striking the ever-so-slightly uplifted outer edges of each eddy-pod is refracted through the body of water at different angles, casting that weird pattern of roughly polygonal false-shadows—“false,” in the sense that nothing is actually blocking the sun—on the river bed. All of the pods are connected, edge to edge: an endless fleet of eddies…revolving amoeboid bubbles rimmed on all sides by others of their kind…each and every eddy-cell a manifestation of chaos and randomness operating according to physical law. Shrinking, swelling, colliding…merging and dividing…giving way in a seamless chaotic anarchy. All the while flowing onward as one united body.
Then, again out of the blue, something else happened: I—that is, regular me; non-science-guy me; the bone-tired ranger who just wanted to get home and out of his filthy uniform—was pervaded by a certain clarity. I was, just like that [snap fingers here], in possession of a Great Truth. It seemed to have been triggered by that last point: flowing onward as one, united body. But no words or conceptualization were involved. Logical thought was bypassed. What appeared in my mind came fully formed. The following is a crude rendition; the best I can come up with. And it won’t sound like much.
This entire river—all rivers—ALL WATERS!—are one colossal entwined network of currents within currents within currents…a turbulent confusion of waves and swirling eddies, interacting without cease: one thing. One GREAT BIG MOVING THING!
Mental-flashes, epiphanies, whatever you care to call them, don’t fare well in translation. Note that the words above don’t add up to a literally true statement: not all lakes and ponds have watercourses flowing in and out of them, after all, and many streams and rivers don’t empty into the great Earth-spanning ocean. (It so happens that the river in question, the West Walker, drains into a land-locked sink—the Great Basin.) My Big Insight was founded on the somewhat fuzzy notion of all waters being one water. Here, it was something I actually visualized via a host of fleeting images. For one brief moment, I saw all this in my mind and knew. But that was just one facet of what took place. The real meat of whatever it was that lit up my mind (again, there’s no way to adequately describe this) was a convoluted, deep understanding of what nature-as-one-colossal-interconnected-network actually means, big picture—of grasping instantaneously the essence of a top-tier, universal truth. Nature as an interconnected whole is a broadly held philosophical/religious precept—a thing that, as an undeclared pantheist, I’ve understood to be true for half a century. The difference here was that this wasn’t something that I thought or believed to be true. Unfortunately, saying “I was possessed by a profound yet simple, wordless understanding,” even with sincere and humble intent, sounds like ostentatious blather. The fact is that any attempt to describe an experience of this nature will fail to capture its core truth. Words can’t convey the emotional impact. In any case: it hit me hard and “felt” like something genuinely insightful.
I should make clear that incidents of this ilk befall me from time to time, always without warning—maybe a dozen big ones and others less impactful, beginning in my early teens. As for trying to express the overall feeling behind these…things-I-don’t-even-have-a-name-for: this may sound silly, but the thing that comes closest to capturing the feel of them is that venerable cartoon lightbulb-over-the-head motif. More to the point, the farcical comic strip character (outstretched arms, saucer-eyed, goofy grin, sweat drops flying) with gleaming light bulb in the thought-bubble over his head denoting the unforeseen arrival of a Great Idea or Perfect Plan. That works for me. As for the weirdness factor: there have been a few semi-hallucinatory apparitions, yes. Usually, time slows to a crawl and things get real quiet. Also, there’s this peculiar zooming-in sensation: seeing things or scenes as if magnified—preternaturally clear…hazy around the edges. I can say categorically that it’s nothing like being on LSD or psilocybin mush-rooms. These “visions” don’t last long. Maybe five or ten seconds. And, once over, bang, I pop right back into normal consciousness—typically with an unvoiced Whoa! THAT was weird!-type reaction. For me, the so-called “big ones” are accompanied by waves of gratitude for having been gifted with something extraordinary. Sometimes (as if these events need validation) they come with a bonus: one of those delicious up-the-spine frissons. Unfortunately, within seconds, whatever it was that just stopped me cold dissipates like smoke, leaving in its wake a sort of residue. There’s a sensation analagous to the anguish of waking from an incredibly stirring, vibrant dream—one of those dreams that fade away and then are just gone even as, still three-quarters asleep, you desperately try to hang on to its memory and message.
Nonetheless: these experiential gifts-of-the-gods tend to have lasting effects on my thinking and morph into vivid, easily recalled memories that remain potent even though the remembrance may only vaguely resemble what actually went down. As for that riverside epiphany: though not as powerful as some, this one comes to mind now and again. It has proven to be a handy allegorical tool, a stepping stone to further imaginative speculation. To illustrate what I mean: What I saw in the river that day came back to me when I first learned of the following—
Over the last few decades astrophysicists have firmly established that galaxies, once thought to be randomly distributed in space, are in fact grouped in clusters. Clusters of from dozens to up to several thousand individual galaxies are found gathered together along linear galactic “filaments“ or in planar “walls” and “sheets” separated by all-but-empty voids hundreds of millions of light years across. Such “supercluster complexes,” largest organized structures in the known universe, are held together gravitationally by aggregations of the mysterious dark matter, forming web-like networks—Networks that, in computer simulations, I recall thinking, bear a passing resemblance to those curious shadows I saw on the river bed. These web-like configurations, astrophysicists tell us, can be envisioned as “an immense cosmic froth” or “galactic foam.” All right, then! We’re talking about something beyond our ken, an enormity so utterly unfathomable that pondering it for more than a few seconds at a time leads to existential distress. All of it, though—everything contained within this incomprehensible vastness, whether it be thin air or fire or flowing water or even galactic foam…all of it—is subject to the same natural laws that shape our world and our daily lives, reiterated at each and every scale in fractal fashion. There’s spacetime. There’s energy. There’s energy in the form of matter, matter in the form of feverishly vibrating subatomic particles. There’s perpetual movement and change…time’s perhaps illusory arrow. There’s chaos and entropy.
At bottom, one could simply say that It’s all waves…waves, ‘all the way down.’
I’m thinking of dancing shadows and the patchwork of dimpled eddies at this very moment. What I saw in the river that afternoon while sitting on the back of a tall blond horse—deep in the backcountry, dog-tired with aching knees—serves as a good practical metaphor for how the entire Universe works. The whole big-bang shebang.
©2024 Tim Forsell 14 Sep 1992, 28 Jun 2024
[*] This narrative was pieced together at a later date. I was seriously baffled by these revealed river-secrets. Because I very much like nature puzzles that involve physics, this watery event received an inordinate amount of mulling over. In all honesty, though, I still don’t understand what I saw and some of my conjectures may be way off. The science of fluid dynamics is, after all, a field of daunting complexity.To make matters worse, chaotic systems of all stripes staunchly resist being understood the way scientifically inclined types like to quote-unquote “understand” things.
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