I Like Productivity (Don’t Get Me Wrong)
Don’t get me wrong. I like productivity. People producing stuff is a beautiful thing. Robots producing stuff is more beautiful still, provided the robots aren’t producing haggis. That would be an ugly thing, and it would give me nightmares, much like Beetlejuice, and also Beatle juice, which tastes vaguely of juju eyeball and toe jam football and walrus gumboot.
Just keep floating, just keep floating. (Red Wash, Utah; May 2021)
Sometimes though I wonder if, instead of measuring success by how much one can produce, it should be measured by how far one can float. On the water. You leave cell service in a city somewhere. You produce nothing, build nothing, improve nothing, do nothing but drift on muddy water. You follow the river and it slices through the dust and the rocks, but it’s a cleaner cut somehow than the gouges and scars that concrete and steel and glass inflict. The scars the water leaves aren’t scars at all, they’re just veins, and you ride them all the way to the heart of something you can’t create or measure or even explain.
This is a beautiful thing. The thick churn of river water going where river water goes, the faint sizzle of water vapor hanging in burning strips low in the sky, the dying sunlight setting it on fire, purple flames, navy flames, then, finally, flames you can’t see for the darkness. Imaginary, but real, at the same time. Both true and false, simultaneously. My daughters laugh suddenly in the tent beside mine on the riverbank. My tent door is open, I look down the river, I think maybe I can see all the way to the ocean. I think of my daughters’ futures out there somewhere, somewhere down that river. Imaginary. But real. True and false at the same time.
Big river keep on rolling. (Crystal Geyser, Utah; May 2021)
This is a beautiful thing. Wind rushes at us. The rock walls soaring above the water gather it into pulses, then push it past our faces. It whistles like static, I can taste it in the space beneath my eyes, in the bones of my ears. I’m paddling vigorously, inching the raft down this canyon that looks like it lasts for miles. My daughters at the back of the raft are paddling absently. They’re telling each other stories, experiences, mixing the past and the future. I catch clips of their laughter between wind gusts. It feels like we’re barely moving, but we are. The wind is against them, but the water is with them. They don’t really seem to notice, they just float. That’s a beautiful thing.
We lost track of the hours. Did they even exist? Now sixty miles are gone behind us. Drowned in the brown river, evaporated into the blistering blue sky, carried off on the worried wind? Maybe they’re still twisting around inside us, carving canyons on the backs of our eyelids so we’ll see them when we dream, from now until forever.
Now the rock walls are that burnt orange they get from facing into a hundred billion arcs of the sun overhead. We drift toward the shore, the raft bumps against the sand, we pull it from the water, push the air from it, fold it up, drive back home. There’s a city somewhere up ahead, swirling beneath an ocean of WiFi and data. But I’m thinking about the water behind me, it builds nothing, produces nothing, just winds and cuts and pushes toward the wild heart of it all. Wherever that is, whatever it is. How far can you float? How much can you make? I like productivity. Don’t get me wrong.
Closer to the heart of it all. (Mineral Bottom, Utah; May 2021)
