usually, on friday and saturday evenings when i don’t have to work, i get this really strong urge bubbling up somewhere inside me to go somewhere and socialize. some nights of the week i can stay in, but there is something about friday that just demands i go out. i generally don’t fight this instinct, and seldom struggle to find something to do.

tonight, i had no plans (and my cell phone wasn’t letting me call people) so i thought to myself that maybe i’d just keep it low-key. it was a challenge, of sorts, to that voice that bullies me into “doing something” - it was a fist raised in resistance against that ever-dominating bully. it felt liberating to deny my impulse to socialize.

i decided to head down to the susquehanna river to get some photos at sunset. i grabbed my backpack, camera and iPod, and put on jeans for the sake of the bugs i was sure to encounter.

last summer i had gone fishing one time with a couple buddies at the river, below norman wood, a really high bridge just downstream from a dam. we had trekked through grass and boulders and puddles, out to an island and then across to the side of the river where water actually flowed and could conceivably provide a habitat for fish. there were signs warning us that when the sirens went off at the dam, we had to get the heck out of there before they let the water out and flooded the place. i was wearing flip flops and shorts at the time and i feared for my life, with the thought of snakes and all, not to mention the potential for flooding. i don’t remember catching any fish that day.

i returned to lock 12 tonight in order to get some photos. while driving down the dirt road towards the dam, i was listening to andrew osenga on my iPod since the car cd player hasn’t been working lately. for driving purposes, i put one earpiece in my right ear, but leave the left one free to listen for horns and sirens and vehicles and things.

“kankakee” came on while on that dirt road. it is a song that invokes a sense of nostalgia in me that is previously unparalleled, though i heard it for the first time less than two years ago. it was actually the day before my twenty-first birthday when my friend brock loaned me the cd, and i’ve been hooked ever since. now the song reminds me of waking up in indianapolis in the middle of the night on a bus ride out to illinois, and of flying over the alps at sunrise on my way back from kenya. i realize that if any one ordinary person would listen to the song for the first time, even those first few notes of it, they probably wouldn’t detect the magic in it that i find inescapable. and a song that is magic for them would likely do nothing for me. but such is the mystery of music.

i pulled over along the highway and walked out onto the bridge, along the narrow sidewalk. looking out at the lush vegetation and then down at the boulders and water and plants and mud, i felt delirious. i wasn’t sure if it was lawful to be walking out on the bridge like i was doing, so i wanted to spend as little time out there as necessary to get my shots. when a truck with a trailer flew by, the gust of wind in its wake made me feel rather precarious, with nothing but a thigh-high railing between me and a plummet to a certain death. i should know that a gust from a truck won’t blow me over the edge, but being really high up, you get nervous and rationality goes out the window.

i snapped a few photos - of the river, the railing, the yellow center line and the drain on the road that went straight down to the river, before driving on across the river. once on the other side, i pulled over again and walked back onto the bridge to get some shots from that end. by this time the sky was turning shades of orange. i took photos, again of the river, but also of spiders and a train passing underneath.

in hopes of getting a few last shots before the sun called it a day, i drove on to river road, which runs along the muddy run dam, and leads to susquehannock state park. by the time i got to the park it was too dark to see much of anything, so i turned around and headed back. when i got back to the part of the road that runs along the dam, i shut off my headlights and kept driving. i was alone on the straight-away and barely able to see the center line and the chain-link fence to my right. with the warm summer air blowing in the window on my left, and andrew osenga singing on my right, i just had to marvel that some people prefer winter to summer.