Bodies, by Marty Blue Waters

I love bodies of water. They are always on the move. A river flows and floods and sometimes is reduced to a little trickle of galloping molecules. The ocean tides keep ancient time. The waves break with a great churning of overexcitement and then leave salty bubbles behind to wash the sand and make it smooth, taking all footprints back into the sea. This never gets tiresome. It's like a steady heartbeat that works on its own whether or not you're aware of it. It is the essence of life, in its various rhythmic patterns.

Even a stagnant pool of yucky water has motion. Rain splatters into it or someone steps in it or a dog drinks from it. A deep, still pond with a mirror surface reflecting land and sky has sudden movement when a frog jumps in and cracks the glass open. Bobbing ripples travel out evenly until their circles disappear and the mirror repairs itself.

I grew up on the ocean floor, also known as Kansas. My bicycle was my boat and it took me far out into that place New Yorkers call "the middle of nowhere." The most magical spot in the universe to me. The land is not greedy for attention the way a mountain range or a panoramic mecca can be. Those things do draw a crowd and are deeply gorgeous. I'll hand them that.

But it's the sky, the clouds, the wind, the moon, the stars, the advancing storms that all do their own spectacular jobs with great, anonymous style that I admire. Different every minute. This is what occupied the mind of a sailor like me. The wind was a brutally brilliant artist friend, creating a constantly moving canvas in endless waves of poetic moods.

When I was around 8 years old, I watched a documentary about how the entire mid section of North America was once a vast, shallow ocean, many many eons ago. Then, when dryness overpowered the elements, the water receded, and the plains were born. Enormous salt mines were left behind, deep underground, and now they serve to supply the needs of the present world, especially when it gets all iced up. And there is also a fresh water ocean hiding deep below the surface of the plains. I'm not sure how that got there, but it has become the basis for farmers' irrigation systems that try to outwit the natural dryness of the land. Someday that will be forced to change into another element too, no doubt.

So thinking of Kansas as the bottom of the ocean was a wonderful image that lodged into my brain and gave me a new perspective on my home terrain. After that, when I hopped on my bike to go explore new dirt roads, following the most exquisite vanishing points imaginable, tooling along endless straight lines next to fields of wheat or pastures of sorghum, I was a sea captain sailing into the uncharted waters of western Kansas. My companions were my dog, jackrabbits, turtles, coyotes, rattlesnakes, birds, skunks, deer, prairie dogs, and anything that moved in its own path whether I saw it or not. All of us traveling along like little fish in the big ocean.