Sunrise ruminations

I love rivers.  I'm drawn to them.  Rivers and their smaller cousins, like Clear Creek, over which I'm perched on the concrete pipe that spans it.  Any chance I get, I'll climb out over moving water.  I wonder if that has some kind of spiritual meaning.  I'll have to look it up.  This water isn't moving, though.  It's stagnant, despite last night's rain.

It's not quite seven in the morning, and though the sun is still out of sight, the gray light of dawn has reached the woods.  It should be bleak, with the dim lighting, the monochrome color scheme, the trees still missing their leaves.  But it feels so alive.

Maybe it's the birds.  The morning chorus has begun in earnest.  A lone owl hoots in the distance, but is far outnumbered by his relatives, whose songs nearly drown him out.

There are no humans.  Most everyone within a quarter mile of me is a college student, and college students don't get up at seven in the morning.  Not that I do, of course; I'm here because I was up all night.  Either way, the hour belongs to me.  The one hour from now until the end of my shift.
I'm not sure, given a photograph, that I could tell the difference between dusk and dawn.  But being here, I can feel the difference.  Even without the birds, I think, I would know.

The air is open... I can hear things further off.  Like when I camped in the woods in Mexico, a mile or more from the ocean.  During the day, you would never know we were near the coast, but at night we could hear the rush of the tide.  It's not that other sounds drown it out--not that I can hear, anyway--they just somehow make the air thicker, so the sound doesn't reach me.

Unfortunately, this openness is helping me hear cars in the distance, which sort of breaks the spell.  The fire department does their morning radio check.  That's my harsh, mechanical contribution to the woods' song.

The cold of the morning is somehow more tolerable than the cold of night.  It's crisp and refreshing, not chilling and oppressive.

I try to call back to a bird and it falls silent.  Suspicious?

As it becomes lighter, I can see that the creek is quivering.  There is always motion, it reminds me... it's just that sometimes it's too dark to see it.

I wonder how long it will take for the earth to remove all traces of humans?  We are always surprised by how quickly nature reclaims grown, like after a volcanic eruption.  Although I suppose such an eruption is nature reclaiming ground in a sudden, violent way.  But I mean living nature.  Plants and animals and microorganisms.

I am scribbling these reflections in my work notebook.  My reflections on nature are tearing through paper.  Irony.

Maybe one day I will give all this up and become a tramp.  I think I would like that.