Organizer: Trey Stockard
Contact: stockardtrey@gmail.com
The Sandy River Cleanup
The cleanup went well – there was less trash than last year, and fewer homeless encampments (not sure if that’s good or bad though – don’t know if the city kicked ’em out or if there’re just fewer displaced people this year). Still have to go back for some of the heavier stuff (a steel girder, some metals, etc) with a “Gator” (the little John Deere 4×4 number you see at high school football games and such) when it becomes available for rent. Sort of an ongoing project it seems, which is good.
Here’s two notes I made on rivers that day::
River. from the ghosts of rain and snowy purity, gestated on Olympuses, born through the mossy wombs and craggy genitals of earth into headwaters and the secret bedrooms of salmon, calling echo, gathering steam, slurping melt, pulled inexorably into the confluences and mainstems, drawn into the din and dirt of cities and pissed out again, stumbling mixtures, lunging frothing churning surging to merge with the salty infinite, born on vapors upwards finally into the Great Spirit of Waters, to be reborn in another land, another time, another vein, of other rain, another clime, another climb, another fall, another. River.
The river is the great metaphor, the river is time, the river is life, the river is the moment stretching endless ceaselessly into the Longest Hour, the river is the bloodline of mystery, revealing secrets, one at a time, and never in the same place. —Trey Stockard