Log Jams

Searching for metaphors, I found one in a recent project I volunteered to help with. It also signaled another return to my hometown.

The “Friends of the Looking Glass River Watershed Council.” had their annual “LogJamBee”. Basically, it was a clean up of trees that had fallen across the river and created impassible blockages for canoes and kayaks.

They needed bodies and chainsaws. Rope. Block and tackles. An ATV with a winch. We would be fed and watered. We would sweat and labor, dodging spiders and leeches and sawdust and muck. Our job was to open the rivers so others could float the tranquil waters without troublesome (and sometimes dangerous) portages around the log jams.

Plus it gave me a chance to break out the chainsaw.

While we worked though, what came out of me were a lot of personal blockages. The cut logs reminded me of how I relieved stress cutting and splitting ash trees while I was working my way through a divorce. The fall air reminded me of an unpleasant personal memory that seems easily triggered by the smell of wet, fallen leaves. The water of the river reminded me of how I would retreat and escape to this very river as a youth, and where I could actually hide from the real world within the steep banks that flowed through the town where I lived. Hide from people who did not understand or care. Did not see the world the way I wanted to see it.

And I began to let go of the doubt and pain that somehow still sparked in me when I was in contact with the place of my past. I was reminded of how I came to love nature by exploring and haunting these very same riverbanks. I exchanged the pain with the pleasurable outcomes of my lives adventures. To realize that good things came from what were bad situations at the time. My job was to re-focus, clear the log jams of my mind. Realize that the “beatings” would cease when the minds “complaining” quit.

So as the river began to once again flow its natural course, I began to stream ahead, no longer impeded by memories that clogged its way.

Photo by Curtis Remington