Beauty #4

This is one of the few pictures taken of me that I, without any reservations, love.

It's me, crossing the Headwaters of the Mississippi up at Itasca for the first time. 

I was an invited third wheel into a nascent relationship. Things were a little awkward (I was along for a weekend trip I didn't know was a weekend trip until much later) until I mentioned that I had never seen the Headwaters of the Mississippi River. The couple took me to the Headwaters and I nearly lost my mind for joy.

I've had a lifelong love affair with the Mississippi River. Whether it was because I read Mark Twain early on or the fact that it links my early years in Wisconsin and my later years in Minnesota. That river has wound its way throughout my entire life and crossing its Headwaters for the first time was one of the most profoundly spiritual moments of my life.

When I wrote in the first post that I fear a sort of Loss of the Creature moments with these entries, this was the one I was thinking about. Unless you've stood at the Headwaters or seen the Mississippi where it empties into the Gulf, it's difficult to describe the beauty and fragility of the river. It's a force onto itself. 

I return the Headwaters once every few years and take off my shoes (always in the fall. I've got to go sometime when the weather is warm) and wade around. I like knowing that however polluted and full of Asian Carp the river is even a hundred miles downstream that this place exists. That there is this one moment in space and time where the Mighty Mississippi is just a stream that you can walk across.