Article 4 - Travel in Local Spaces, “OTSELIC RIVER” May 2006 edition of First Church of The Streets

The river runs past us, to a destination unseen. Just as we come right up to the edge, its water teasing us, it shies away, meeting us briefly before it makes its escape, branching off into other rivers and changing its identity.

Otselic River doesn't appear to be very big river, at least compared to bodies such as Susquehanna. It's mostly surrounded by different brooks, and from the map, doesn't look much bigger than a brook itself. Where we were, it stood quietly, as though it was waiting for something. The parking lot stood to one side of it. On the other, there was a snippet of a trail, as miniaturized as what my perception of the river was. It invited us to weave our way through vegetation to hidden place, as though it could take us to a faraway land, if we only imagined.

We hadn't even planned on going to the river, at least to begin with. Originally, we'd calibrated a reservoir to go to in our GPS, but it turned out to be on private property. So for the next try, we went with good old fashioned curiosity and just stopped at the first thing that appealed to us. A small fishing access beckoned us to Otselic River, so there we went.

Now we were on its trail, winding and weaving through the brambles that someone had forgotten about. It was like being in a tame jungle, though being lulled into complacency wasn't a good idea when brush snapped into your faces. Even the most benign mysteries require some diligence and caution.

It wasn't too long before we got to a clearing, and the trail ended with it abruptly. There was someone's farm on one side, its grasses beginning right at the end of the trail. It was like the clearing was the demarcation of this property, an abrupt transference from public to private, permitted to forbidden.

And on the bank of the river was a reminder that this was more than a placid place of nature: a gas line marker. This happens more than I would imagine in a bucolic world, but it is logical in simplicity. After all, even in ancient cities such as Sumeria, civilization was dictated by the rivers that surrounded it. There was no reason to stop that now.

Other signs of man's touch: some wooden apparatus floating in the water, something that most likely had been thrown out by someone. Maybe it had been some kind of pallet, or part of some construction site. Whatever it had been in the land of the living, it had a watery grave now.

According to my atlas, an angler could find largemouth and smallmouth bass, northern pike, and walleye. It's my guess that one needed a permit. I hadn't fished since I was ten, so I wasn't that up to the regulations, but from what I knew, there was a pretty strict coding system by New York DEC. I saw nothing in the water but the wooden carcass. Looking behind me, the field of dandelions with its farmhouse in the background created a setting for a lush landscape watercolor.

We stood on the bank, where slates of rock lay buoying up the shores, listening to the silence around us. Small wildflowers kept us company during our contemplation. If I were more into fishing, this would be a nice place to rest, spending a day amongst the foliage and greenery. Never mind man's disturbances here; somehow it felt like it had always been here, part of the slow evolution that had worn away the banks to create this body of water. I watched the river go downstream, and felt part of that process myself.