River
The photographs here were made in an area of riparian greenbelt along the American River, near my home in Sacramento. I have been going to the river—meaning not just the water channel but also the adjacent woodlands and fields—for much of my life. In high school, the river was a place of escape and refuge from the seeming absurdities of suburban daily life. It became that again when, unexpectedly, I returned to live in this city ten years ago. I rediscovered the river on morning walks and runs, and experienced it again—as I had as a teenager—as a place governed by different rules than the neighborhoods on the other side of the levee. In its patchy expanses of habitat, often beat-up and bedraggled by human over-use, a kind of wildness persisted. Not as wilderness, certainly, or “nature” in some undisturbed state, but as a kind of unaccountable aliveness uniting the curving ribbon of water with everything—animate and inanimate—surrounding it.
I thought I knew what to expect from the river. But as soon as I began making pictures there, the familiar landscape expanded and became new again, both in the things I encountered while walking through it and in the thoughts that followed me home. I began to perceive the river—correctly, I believe—as a living entity, a being whose body stretches from the Sierras to the Pacific and whose life encompasses vast stretches of time. Over the millions of years since the mountains rose and the valley formed, the river has been here. A different river every morning, and the same river as in eons past. I made the pictures with these thoughts in mind. This is the river today, with its random paths and gesturing branches, its mixture of native and non-native vegetation, its inscrutable human signs and marks. This is how it showed itself to me.
