raft ice on the MO_ve

The city is enjoying a January warm spell that is expected to carry into the next week. Over the last few years, I noticed a change in the weather patterns - especially in the fall, winter, and early spring.

Fall tends to be much drier than it used to be. Rarely do we have those lingering 2-3 days of soaking rains in October and November. They haven't disappeared entirely, but they are rare. This could be related to a long-term drought pattern that's been skirting the Midwest for the last 5-6 years.

The winter weather patterns have also changed quite a bit. Snow, and cold weather, if we have it at all, usually comes in early December. Most of December this year, we had some snow on the ground. Unfortunately not enough for x-country skiing, but enough to keep the temperatures down and the gas bills up. This is typically followed by a warm, and usually dry, January. With highs near 60 degrees and sunshine, it makes one pine for spring, cycling, or even paddling around on the river. Dodging the pack ice on the Missouri could be adventuresome but it's not recommended without a wetsuit. Remember Mr. Fish? We started with Mr. Fish back in April, 2007.

It's a hard to see scale in the above photo, but the circular ice raft is about 20 feet in diameter.

In memory of Mr. Fish

Here's a poem in memory of Mr. Fish for those who might be paddling about
this weekend and thinking about spring, life, and what's important. I think it's a beautiful poem, a bit sad, but with a hint of hope and artful reminiscence.
Mr. Fish and a friend were both paddling without pfd's, on a windy day, on a rising river in a recreational kayak on the Kaw River near Eudora, Kansas. The water temperature was around 2 degrees Celsius. Both boats upended almost simultaneously. Witnesses on shore saw this, called 911 and a rescue was attempted. The friend survived. Mr. Fish's body wasn't recovered for several weeks. Mr. Fish, his real name, left behind a wife and 4 children.

The poem is by Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the US and published in The Art of Drowning, Pittsburg University Press, 1995

The Art of Drowning

I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.

After falling off a steamship or being swept away
in a rush of floodwater, wouldn't you hope
for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand
turning the pages of an album of photographs -
you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a comic hat.

How about a short animated film, a slide presentation?
Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model paragraph?
Wouldn't any form be better than this sudden flash?
Your whole existence going off in your face
in an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography--
nothing like the three large volumes you imagined.

Survivors would have us believe in a brilliance
here, some bolt of truth forking across the water,
an ultimate Light before all the lights go out,
dawning on you with all its megalithic tonnage.
But if something does flash before your eyes
as you go under, it will probably be a fish.

a quick blur of curved silver darting away,
having nothing to do with your life or your death.
The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all
as you sink toward the weedy disarray of the bottom,
leaving behind what you have already forgotten.
the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds.

see also:
m.o.i.: raft ice on the mo