THE JOY OF DISCOVERY

Rex Burress

The river had finally settled down during a calm break after a riotous winter of dam spillway spills of high water, and I could actually see the gravel bars and mangled trees at Bedrock Park.

Gingerly, I edged onto heaps of gravel dredged out of the depths by flood as efficiently as those monstrous dredges of gold rush days. The gold had nosed its way back to the bottom bedrock evidently, because I didn't find any fist-sized nuggets! I did find tons of wondrous rocks rounded smooth after millions of years of tumbling. Little mind that erratic dam-release had re-covered the rocks next day!

The effects of the water force was staggering. At the spillway, they are dealing with a Godzilla water monster able to bend steel and jump mountains in a single bound! Under the pressure of water pushing water, hard rocks are ripped from anchorage and rumbled around like blowing bubbles in the wind! No wonder crawdads and catfish have such a hard time of it when water is moving at a mere 20,000 cubic feet a second! Think 100,000 cfs! When it floods at migration time, salmon and diving ducks are severely disturbed by silt and surging stones in the stream speed.

Thus I looked around at the thrashing the river channel had taken. Besides the up-heaved rocks, the assortment of uprooted trees and driftwood piles in the branches were spectacular, plus photogenic if you look at it that way, and even the yellow-clay sediment had settled to the bottom of quiet pools and plastered other gravel bars a dingy gray that will take years to fully reveal again. In the fast current, ton-sized boulders were even pushed around.

I could poke around and ponder such eroded shorelines for hours, as a joyous feeling of free natural art is on display. Great effort goes into making a museum exhibit appear realistic, but there's no art gallery or sculpture as splendid as found in the outdoors...in spite of the turmoil involved.

The joy of exploration extends into the jungles where something new can be found with every step, sending an electrical tingle of beauty and wonder throbbing into your brain. Beetle hunters, plant searchers, and stone seekers know that passion of immediate possession, procured freely at one's own effort and understanding.

You could call it 'beachcombing' by any other name, alias archeology, geology, paleontology, mineralogy, and other -ological disciplines of earthy features. Once felt, the joy of finding nature curiosities and natural wonders is difficult to equal. The chatter of the river, wind whining in the woods, the natural palette of colors, or the roar of the shore are things that accompany those quests.

When I first lived in San Francisco, I discovered the beach, learned about the tides moving the sands, and found my first notable Franciscan jasper gem rock there that sent me into lapidary and on to distant places to search for fine rocks. On the beaches, there were other curio castoffs to find and photograph, and it helped having a family of nature lovers along that could share those delights...and a child is indeed delighted with jellyfish, clams, bugs, worms, and any shiny pebble!

“There is no such thing as the pursuit of happiness, but there is the discovery of joy.”--Joyce Grenfell

“We've become so accustomed to teaching to the test and text that we've forgotten about a child's joy of discovery.”--Elizabeth Esty

“The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.” --Richard P. Feynman

“Nature is ever at work building up and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.”--John Muir