Fluid Dynamics

I discovered something unexpectedly Parisian about Minneapolis on a trip through there in 2000. That something is the Mississippi River which flows through Minneapolis like the Seine flows through Paris. The Seine does a lot more meandering and curving than the Mississippi, which suits the Parisian temperament, whereas the Mississippi is by and large a straight shot through town. It’s in a hurry to go south, where all the real fun starts: riverboats, barges carrying cotton, grain, soybeans, wheat, corn, lumber, fertilizer, metals, sand, gravel, gasoline, petroleum and coal and coke and iron. People fishing and waterskiing, canoeing and kayaking and strolling along its banks.

The Seine, as it flows leisurely through Paris, doesn’t allow swimming, but you can fish for bigmouth buffalo, brown bullhead, burbot, black crappie, blacknose dace, brook stickleback, carp, mudminnow, fathead minnow, emerald shiner, golden redhorse and catfish. You can make a wish on a bridge (the Pont des Arts, a pedestrian bridge leading to the Louvre is particularly recommended) with your wife or husband or lover, inscribe your names on a padlock purchased from a purveyor of padlocks located conveniently nearby, toss the key to said padlock into the river, where I can only imagine the mass of keys resting in the mud below. You can walk. You can more than walk. You can strut, stride, stroll, mosey, dawdle, dally, dash, leap, sprint, saunter, tramp, tread, promenade, ramble, or ambulate to your heart’s content on the banks and quays, or sit and watch the barges, lighters, flutes, tugs, tugboats, towed convoys, houseboats, batabuses and the bateaux mouches for the tourists travel up and down the fluvial highway.

I think about rivers a lot. I think about them more than any other body of water, including lakes, ponds, marshes, swamps, bayous, oceans, gulfs, basins, lagoons, sluices, swimming pools, runnels, creeks, streams or urinary tracts. I left out puddles. I think about puddles almost as much as I think about rivers. Puddles are transitory, miniature lakes. If lakes could get up and walk around and lie down on a street wherever they felt like it they’d be puddles. Big ones. With docks and bait shops. Fortunately, what makes a lake a lake is its indisposition to movement. Lakes like it fine where they are. That’s why they tend to glitter, and appear so alluring in the summer. Look at me, they seem to say, I’m covered in diamonds, big, solar-powered celestial diamonds, the glitter of many eons and the envy of obdurate mountains and verdant tropical forests. I’m a model of tranquility, teeming with life-giving elements and elfin gaiety, and my waters are cool and refreshing. I welcome you. I long for you. I’m here for you.

As for swimming pools, I’ve noticed they tend to show up in movies a lot. Like The Swimmer, with Burt Lancaster, in which he swims from one neighbor’s pool to another in a wealthy Connecticut neighborhood, stopping to chat, laughing and joking with a conviviality bordering on mania, as the pools get dirtier and the people grow less friendly. It’s an eerie movie with an undercurrent of doom. My favorite poolside scene occurs in The Big Lebowski, as The Dude sidles up to the young and voluptuous Bunny who lifts her creamy smooth leg and asks him to blow on her freshly lacquered red toenails. The Dude takes a prudent look down at the pool and sees a man floating unconscious on an air mattress with an emptied bottle of booze floating next to him. “Are you sure he won’t mind,” he asks. “Oh, don’t worry about Uli. He's a nihilist. Nihilists don’t care about anything.” “That must be exhausting,” The Dude replies.

I get more emotional around oceans. It’s hard not to. Everything mysterious and baffling and weird and gooey about life is on display there. Oceans are huge. Look out to the horizon and you sense immediately you’ve come face to face with eternity. You can hear it, smell it, taste it, feel it tingle on your skin, an endless, incomparably huge chill of mist & latitude. Even in daylight eternity looks pretty daunting. The word ‘sublime’ comes to mind. Especially when there’s an  obscuring mist veiling the point where the sky meets the water. The effect is unsettling. Oceans are hard to cozy up to, they’re not amiable like lakes, they’re big and dangerous and aren’t afraid to let you know that. Sharks inhabit them. Pirates do their sinister & ugly business on them. Ghostly ships appear and disappear. The bottom of all the oceans are strewn with shipwrecks. Roman amphoras and WWII era destroyers and battleships. There are tragedies everywhere, but you can’t call oceans tragic. They’re too primordial, too elemental. It’s like calling outer space tragic. Outer space is supremely inhospitable but it’s not tragic. Things like that are foreign to the workings of the human mind. I doubt that even the fish understand the medium in which they have a life. Maybe the whales and dolphins enjoy a conceptual understanding of the ocean that is far more profound and expansive than ours, but if they do, they’re not letting us in on it.

And then there are waterfalls. This is water in its most fascinating manifestation. It plummets recklessly, freely, tumultuously into the void and speaks with an endless roar. Then a few feet down from the big neverending crash it gets glassy and tranquil again, like nothing happened. Like moments of hysteria are completely natural, and nothing to worry about, they resolve, the energy dissipates, and you go your way, slipping over rocks and other impediments with bubbling insouciance. Falls happen. It’s all a matter of random variables and bell curves and deviations, abrasions, riffles, rootwads and backwater pools. Chaos is a part of life. You can’t stop it.  You can’t prevent it. You can’t contain it. You can’t corral or cage or tame or domesticate it. You just let it happen. Flow. Chuckle over the rocks. Keep going. Going. And over the edge and fall. Roar. Break into a million droplets, deliriums of rainbow and mist. After all the smashing and crashing and churning and tumult, a few further feet downstream you’ll find yourself whole again and gliding serenely along, freshly aerated and hungry for sediment.