The river takes on different looks on different mornings. Sometimes it seems mystical, sometimes lonely, or threatening, sometimes exuberant and jolly, sometimes downright eerie as though it were on another planet. (And thinking about that, it occurs to me that none of those science fiction books of my youth that were set on water-worlds talked about the clamminess, or the way sounds are distorted over water, or the smell of salt and seaweed.) This morning it was mundane -- not a bad thing, just a feeling that the river was part of the everyday world. Lots of traffic, barges and ferries and tugs, helicopters criss-crossing. (It completely mystifies me why some days the traffic is heavy, some days no one seems to be going anywhere.) A police launch raced north, disappeared, came charging south again ten minutes later, and stopped absolutely dead. It stayed, drifting almost imperceptibly upstream (the current was just changing, so it wasn't strong in either direction) for a few minutes, then started its engine again and went on south in the nautical equivalent of an amble.

One of the great things about watching the river is how it reminds me of the value of the pure observer part of the mind, as opposed to the analyzer. I have no idea what half the stuff I see means -- what the police boat was doing, why the traffic comes and goes (or where it's coming and going to), what the barges are carrying. I can make up stories (the cops had engine trouble? were on a training run? stopped for a doughnut break? answered a radio call that might have taken them back up north but in the end they didn't go?) but there's no way I'll ever know. So I might as well just watch, just observe. Doing that strengthens mental muscles that are sometimes skipped in the mind's rush to figure things out, to understand.