Where I spent my Saturday morning

This is how Lewis and Clark saw it--well, recorded it anyway. It's their map. That huge snaking presence that begins in the corner, bottom right, and squiggles all the way into the center, where it breaks into two, is the country's longest river, the Missouri, or the Mud, which finally flows into the Mississippi at St. Louis, the granddaddy of American rivers, although the Mississippi, for good reason, gets all the good press.

Let me bring this up a bit.

Right there in the center is "Floyd's grave," the place where the Corps of Discovery left Sgt. Floyd's body after his agonizing death from what people these days assume was a ruptured appendix. Today--Sioux City, Iowa. The river just north of that spot is the river L and C named "The Floyd." For the record, what there is of it right now--it's very low--is about 150 yards north of where I'm sitting.

You've got to go all the way to the top left hand corner to see what they called "The Sioux River," which today we call "the Big Sioux," as opposed to "the Little Sioux," which you'll find flowing out of Spirit Lake (center right) and into the Missouri just east of the biggest bend in that almost intestinal Mud.

Since, digitally, the files (the photographs themselves) are each permanently stamped with location, let me usher you even closer. I was just off the little river road (4) at a place where the river decided, years ago (some people claim rivers have minds), to cut a big bend--a mile west of Hawarden and just a little south.

Even closer maybe.

See that felled tree just off the west bank of the river? Here it is as of Saturday morning.

Just huge, but a series of floods, almost endless high water last year, eventually ate away the bank until this monster came down. No more than a couple years ago, it stood right here where I'm standing; now it's out in the water, an ungainly mess.

For the record, here it is from the other side. The photo isn't taken for documentation. I snapped it and about a hundred others (many already gone to whatever oblivion digital files are sent into when deleted) simply for beauty. I know, I know--beauty is most definitely in the eye of the beholder. But I've been on the lookout for beauty and its blessings for 15 years--or more. Here's a shot from the same place, pre-dawn, 2006, a darkly mournful sky out east.

So, Saturday morning, did I find any beauty? No accounting for taste, I know. Here's another of that same fallen tree, closer.

Stunning? I don't know, but I liked the way the light of the dawn caught something almost in the womb of that far branch (I can hardly call it a branch, it's so immense). And, if you can call the bark of an old cottonwood beautiful--I certainly can--then you might be able to call this shot beautiful.

What's amazing about a natural place like this Big Sioux river bank, in the middle of nowhere, is that in the radiance of dawn there's just so much of it, of beauty, I mean, that it's there wherever you and the lens look.