Meditation, North Fork of the Cosumnes
The Cosumnes is a free flowing river of the western Sierra, named for the Tuolumne word for chinook salmon, kosum.
The salmon used to run high into the Sierra, until we started damming everything in California in order to feed ourselves. Yes, that pun is intentional.
The Cosumnes begins 7,500 feet above sea level in El Dorado County (Gold Country), drops through Amador County, and ends up south of Sacramento in Elk Grove (elevation 46’), where it flows into the 50,000-acre Cosumnes River Preserve, some of the largest remaining wetlands in the Central Valley.
The Cosumnes ultimately joins the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, which in my mind connects it to the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean (the same way a chinook salmon thinks).
Today, we cross the North Fork of the Cosumnes near Somerset, on a crumbly, one-lane bridge, safely above the spring run-off flume that notches these foothills into canyons with cold fury, and later in the year, with sweet tenderness beneath dry, yellow leaves.
It’s a typical March day. What started out as bright, late-winter sunshine is covered in gray from the next storm moving in. The 2011–2017 drought is over, and the more snow that falls above us in the Sierra, the more run-off is present to rush down the range and carve these canyons even deeper.
Here, at 2,200 feet above sea level, the gradient is steep and the velocity of the water is high. What’s happening directly below us on the Cosumnes is quite simple: the river is completing the hydrologic cycle by returning precipitation that falls on the Sierra to the Pacific oceans. Flowing water does the work of both erosion and deposition.
Higher up, near the headwaters, the Cosumnes dislodges large particles from river bank and river bed, and transports the sediment rapidly, carried along as dissolved and suspended loads.
Along the way, ions form, and they remain in solution, unseen, all the way to the ocean.
Below, in the Delta, the gradient lessens. The river slows, entering standing water, and the sediment is deposited as smaller particles known as bed loads.
I find a life corollary here, bordering on a spiritual lesson (Nature has a way of doing that).
Erosion, real and metaphorical, is a natural part of life. As Carl Jung expressed it, “The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.”
We hope for as much ourselves, to be landscape transformed, hillsides worn down into something else entirely, almost unrecognizable. Ego softens, grooves appear, just like lines on our faces.
We will not let go of identity at once, or easily, so we must be dismantled in large particles first, so that the river, like a tumbler, will eventually reduce to small particulate, to sand.
Time’s fierce water dislodges and removes us, dispatching the granules downstream, into deltas, bays, and estuaries, sea- seeking, just like the salmon.
Jon Obermeyer’s has published three collections of essays, The Low Wire, Laying Low and Hear Me Out. This essay will appear in his next collection, Migratory Patterns.
