Speaker 1: The first thing you learn as a map maker is
Speaker 1: that everything shifts. Stone river, even the old ways of name.
Speaker 1: A hill sax with time, a foot bath sprawls into
Speaker 1: a lane because two neighbors struck up a friendship one winter.
Speaker 1: But this river named Lutz are on some maps Irreber
Speaker 1: in the older stories, though nobody uses those names in
Speaker 1: daily talk, has always seemed immune. I believe that until
Speaker 1: the morning I saw it right. Every Monday, since retiring
Speaker 1: from the map in office in Donostria, I've come down
Speaker 1: to the reclining curve beneath a willow, drawing water levels
Speaker 1: and the idle changes brought on by storm and season.
Speaker 1: It's an old habit, almost a ritual now, but I
Speaker 1: still carry abatto field notebook pencils, two pairs of glasses.
Speaker 1: Routine STEADI is the fog that creeps in after years
Speaker 1: a professional, certainties evaporate. And so I found myself last
Speaker 1: March proaching on that squad like and splattered bench by
Speaker 1: the foot bridge, squinting at the shallows, not out of
Speaker 1: boredom but habit. It was too early for bickers or birds,
Speaker 1: and the mislapped around my ankle's tall wound over the river.
Speaker 1: The stones in the water, larger boulders pushed here by
Speaker 1: last month's flood, were revealed in an odd hush as
Speaker 1: the sun called up the valley rim For a moment,
Speaker 1: I paid little attention, distracted by the cold and the
Speaker 1: faint ache in my knees, until a widening goal caught
Speaker 1: the top of the bridge, glanced along the current and
Speaker 1: picked out shapes albong yet oddly rhythic. They glinted in
Speaker 1: the shallows, their arrangement suddenly and unmistakably legible. See u
Speaker 1: h a t zie The word floated there sew hatza
Speaker 1: k classic basque, And though the coincidence struck me only
Speaker 1: after a moment, his surname here the Siouetes of family's
Speaker 1: backery stands just down the lane, sent wafting through my
Speaker 1: Monday ramble, like a friendly reminder to eat. I blinked,
Speaker 1: looked away, then back. The ladders remained, but if I
Speaker 1: shifted a pace left or right along the bridge familiarity
Speaker 1: in mavel from many were except the precise midpoint, where
Speaker 1: the low sun struck flat, the semblance vanished, the stones
Speaker 1: and shadows reverted into formlessness. I stood adjusted my glasses
Speaker 1: the strange cart He faded within moments, dissolving as the
Speaker 1: sun lifted and the undertow altered the surface of silver.
Speaker 1: I crouched and tried to puzzle out which stones might
Speaker 1: make up these Z. When I looked straight down, nothing inspired,
Speaker 1: no chisel marks or arrangements from above. Only scattered pebbles,
Speaker 1: some barnacle, some pressed deep with silt. Only at that angle,
Speaker 1: at that hour, did the name exist. Nerves humming. I
Speaker 1: grabbed my sketch pad and worked by memory before the
Speaker 1: river re arranged the story. I drew the long flat
Speaker 1: stone for the cross of the Z, bulges for the U,
Speaker 1: the ottook on the final that echoed our ancient bass.
Speaker 1: Typography fell fragile, already half illusioned by the time the rinsang.
Speaker 1: I thought of natural coincidence first. After so many years
Speaker 1: reading forms into maps, you catch your mind tricks. But
Speaker 1: the choreography was uncanny, the spacing, the weight each stone
Speaker 1: leaked into alignment only from a singular angle book siu Hatze?
Speaker 1: Was it just the word leading to my mind because
Speaker 1: of my habit of buying bread from assessed su Hatze.
Speaker 1: There's a danger in pattern seeking. A cartographer's occupational hazard. Still,
Speaker 1: I penciled the positions on my working map, careful to
Speaker 1: note the day of time, the angle of the sun.
Speaker 1: As the clouds tuggered the light away, the river smoved over,
Speaker 1: empty again, as if erasing itself behind me, That strange
Speaker 1: ripple of sceining fascination tinged with something quieter, more reflective,
Speaker 1: lingered al for breakfast. By the time I reached the bakery,
Speaker 1: my hunger was an after thut. I couldn't shake the
Speaker 1: sensation of the word assembling itself for me, privately, without
Speaker 1: witness or purpose. In those first hours, I hesitated to
Speaker 1: mention it, even to myself. Perhaps I had been awake
Speaker 1: too early, or the reflections had tricked me. But then
Speaker 1: I remembered rivers hold stories differently from stone. Water stores
Speaker 1: them in movement, not in place. At a sat alone
Speaker 1: in the kitchen, chewing a slice of barley bread, the
Speaker 1: question stubbornly returned, as the river always written, and as
Speaker 1: simply never stood in the right spot to see it.
Speaker 1: Over the years, you collect a kind of map of
Speaker 1: your own routines, one that brazed community, landscape and memory.
Speaker 1: Mine is written in the rituals of a small bus
Speaker 1: town that purchase along the lertz et Etisande. I came
Speaker 1: back here after thirty years away, after a retirement stole
Speaker 1: the steady shape of my working days. I was supposed
Speaker 1: to rest. Instead, I started pursuing the tan, slow recurring rhythms,
Speaker 1: mapping them in lairb ways, places where the elders gather,
Speaker 1: on coal benches, where children leap from rock to rock,
Speaker 1: where the scent of sorrow signals evening. I mapless for
Speaker 1: any one else, then for myself, a record against forgetting.
Speaker 1: Most of my neighbors tolerate this with the mewsewarmth. My
Speaker 1: field notebooks, spattered and marked by rain, are a familiar site.
Speaker 1: As I looped past the market square, pausing every few
Speaker 1: meters to measure or not an odd bit of dialect ata.
Speaker 1: The last of the town's true fishermen, delights in teasing me.
Speaker 1: Your feet no more past than my old dog, He'll say,
Speaker 1: nodding from beneath his bass bare as I passed by
Speaker 1: the steps near Sarjeant punto Witch's Point, a name far
Speaker 1: older than Christian memory. Beneath our Lady's bell tower, houses
Speaker 1: crowd narrow lanes of bat at stone red tile, roofs
Speaker 1: still drip from each weak washing, and window boxes brimmed
Speaker 1: with flowers as spring approaches. The bakery sits at the
Speaker 1: corner of the square, run by the same Yuhts, a
Speaker 1: family whose name I read in the river, though it's
Speaker 1: also said the actual family name was once Erica, the
Speaker 1: basque for stream, before a long ago tax dispute. Markets
Speaker 1: are a gentle cacophony, soft exchanges of onions cheese as
Speaker 1: to cutover weather gossip. Children cluster by the river. Favored
Speaker 1: stones pressed between their fingers are thrown to plunk the water,
Speaker 1: each ripple another memory. Local festivals like Gauge are the
Speaker 1: night Festival and frill banners that echoed the same riverside
Speaker 1: colors blue gray, lichen green, the red of crumbling brick.
Speaker 1: The river itself is near a mighty nor mek. It
Speaker 1: meanders and splits, forming small islands and secret innots, sometimes
Speaker 1: edged with new flood debris, sometimes gorged with meltwater. Pabbles
Speaker 1: gather at the narrowing south bend, creating tiny isles the
Speaker 1: children claim by seasonal right. The willow trees lean low
Speaker 1: as a feeveswopping, and every so often someone leaves, reverbond
Speaker 1: or a painted stone at egeryhat would anile, another spot
Speaker 1: honored more by tradition than necessity. Along the square and awkward,
Speaker 1: faded neural watch as overpasses by the blue swelling stylized
Speaker 1: river painted by local students in the nineteen seventies. It
Speaker 1: surface into ovem with cryptic shades, hucks loops, dots that
Speaker 1: resemble letters only if you half close your eyes. No
Speaker 1: one quite remembers what they were supposed to represent. The
Speaker 1: elders laugh when I ask at the river's memories, or
Speaker 1: maybe its secrets. I note this in my book, alongside
Speaker 1: the local saying that seems to predate even the mural.
Speaker 1: The river remembers before we do. There is history too,
Speaker 1: written low into the land. A marker stone ways high
Speaker 1: and hunched, stands near the willow's roots, so old that
Speaker 1: the text carve upon has eroded into a series of
Speaker 1: shallow and readable bumps and walls. Eggers Keyny, who teaches
Speaker 1: local history at the primary school, swears that the inscription
Speaker 1: was never deciphered, though teenagers have tried by daylight and
Speaker 1: candle and failed. After generations of tracing paper rubbins, these layers, ritual, place,
Speaker 1: memory make up the texture of it, asando the weather
Speaker 1: that supports even my odd mapping habits. In this town,
Speaker 1: small deviations from the expected shape of things I met
Speaker 1: with a kind of gentle acceptance. If the river's path
Speaker 1: tosses up a new rock over night, the children might
Speaker 1: give it an aim and the elder's nod, as though
Speaker 1: it had always been there. Maybe that's why for the
Speaker 1: rest of that week I hesitated to mention what I'd seen.
Speaker 1: I told myself it was a trick of sunlight, or
Speaker 1: perhaps my mind, trained by decades of aligning every feature
Speaker 1: with a cord and is simply caught in a pattern
Speaker 1: seeking moment. But the question gnawed at the mornings, was
Speaker 1: I missing something everyone else already knew. Tuesday came chill
Speaker 1: and bright. Determined to check my curiosity, I arrived earlier
Speaker 1: than usual, waiting before mister deven mcgun to thin again.
Speaker 1: I took up my vantage on the footbridge, heart beating
Speaker 1: with the kind of measured excitement that had once accompanied
Speaker 1: the appearance of a repenansul on a satellite scan. But
Speaker 1: this time the word wasn't there, or rather, the stones
Speaker 1: had shifted suddenly enough that from the right spot, in
Speaker 1: the right gold soaked clare, I could read something something
Speaker 1: else t x O r I teasori. Third, the same
Speaker 1: unmistakable alignment of stone and shadow resolved only from that
Speaker 1: sweet narrow angle as the river caught the early sun.
Speaker 1: I couldn't tell if the arrangement had changed by the
Speaker 1: river's own movements or by someone seen hand. There were
Speaker 1: no footprints in the muddy bank, no obvious signs of tampering,
Speaker 1: just a pebble here, a water worn slab there, outlines
Speaker 1: forming almost against a will. I found myself glancing around,
Speaker 1: half expecting to see some clever child dart way giggling,
Speaker 1: or perhaps the local dog nosing stones while his owner
Speaker 1: lingered at the vickery. But nothing moved on shore except
Speaker 1: the quick, sharp silhouet of a wagtail. I allowed myself
Speaker 1: a dry chuckle teasory. Indeed, the memory prickled. Just yesterday
Speaker 1: I'd seen young maons catching the same mugtail beneath the
Speaker 1: stand of Reed's further upstream. Over the years, I've admired
Speaker 1: Maelon's talents. Her bird water colors have pride of place
Speaker 1: beside the post office, but the river had no way
Speaker 1: of knowing about yesterday's drawing, could it with a cartographer's discipline,
Speaker 1: and marked the shift precisely in my note book. I
Speaker 1: compared sketches those who had some letter stones here now
Speaker 1: re aligned as teasery to day. The differences were unmistakable.
Speaker 1: Stone's displace, light angling at a slightly different slant, and
Speaker 1: new cluster drawing the sharp tail. If thou are, the
Speaker 1: more I stare, the more it felt systematic, not just
Speaker 1: the thrum of coincidence barading as miracle. Determined to test
Speaker 1: my growing suspicion, I waited for signs of interference. If
Speaker 1: children had moved the stones, they'd leave scrapes in the mud.
Speaker 1: If a prankster had set this up, I'd find footprints,
Speaker 1: or perhaps a discarded glove ostick hues to nudge rocks,
Speaker 1: just sir, But the bank was undistowed, still sly me
Speaker 1: with last night rain host to nothing except the sharp
Speaker 1: prints of a heron's midnight visit. Unable to hold my
Speaker 1: tongue any longer, I brought up the sighting that afternoon
Speaker 1: with eggs Kay and history teacher, as we walked the
Speaker 1: market lay while she gathered ingredients for Thursday's soup. I
Speaker 1: expect it's a prize, or at least some flicker of curiosity.
Speaker 1: She listened, frowning at an onion and shrugged, It happens
Speaker 1: the river likes to gossip. And then before I could
Speaker 1: press the point, she steered the conversation away to the
Speaker 1: way scold children now use more Spanish than bask on
Speaker 1: the playground. Her reaction seemed so bland, so matter of fact,
Speaker 1: that it caught me off guard. Was it not unusual
Speaker 1: or was she refusing to humor me? After a moment,
Speaker 1: I tried again with Ada at the bakery, hoping his
Speaker 1: word of face would betray something startlemant. Confusion, may be
Speaker 1: mockery at my expense. Instead, he grinned, spreading butter liberally
Speaker 1: on to heel of bread. You only see what you expect,
Speaker 1: he said. The River's written my name there for years
Speaker 1: when I need it anyway. The other woman waiting in
Speaker 1: line rolled her eyes as if she had heard this
Speaker 1: many times, but Ada kept smiling. Once after my wife
Speaker 1: got bad news, she saw a word to didn't tell
Speaker 1: anyone what it was, didn't need to. They all seemed
Speaker 1: so un bothered, uninvested, as if these incidents were nothing
Speaker 1: more than weather or the creak of flaw boards. Curious
Speaker 1: only to outsiders. I couldn't tell if their was disinterested
Speaker 1: or a subtle way of shielding themselves from something harder
Speaker 1: to explain. After another day, it became clear this was not,
Speaker 1: after all, a solitary experience. Yet it was not a
Speaker 1: secret either. If the river, however, erratically wrote names no
Speaker 1: one else saw reason to require beyond a shrug or proverb.
Speaker 1: This calm was its own kind of strangeness, the natural
Speaker 1: order inverted. Most villages leave a brick and pattern, exaggerate
Speaker 1: odd happenings, attribute them to gostas saints, or perhaps an
Speaker 1: old civil war. Here the extraordinary slid under the skin
Speaker 1: of daily life, questioned by no one accept me. That night,
Speaker 1: I lay awake replaying the simple outlines of the words
Speaker 1: I'd seen. My first instinct coincidence now felt less comforting
Speaker 1: than inadequate. The pattern held a firmness that refused to fade,
Speaker 1: names that shifted, words that meant something personal, but never
Speaker 1: the same thing. On two mornings, the unjustifiable became systematic.
Speaker 1: I started to feel less amuse him, more persistently, restlessly
Speaker 1: curious why would the river write at all? And why
Speaker 1: in this ephemeral tone, was it a trick of collective agreement,
Speaker 1: some communal way of reflecting the lived events of its
Speaker 1: own sando, as if the river held memory better than people?
Speaker 1: And why the above all did no one else seem to
Speaker 1: want an answer. Faced with indifference around me, I found
Speaker 1: my own curiosity growing sharper after that, a new kind
Speaker 1: of seriousness to cold. I did what any properly trained
Speaker 1: observer would. I began a methodical investigation. Armed with notebooks,
Speaker 1: a small time piece, color pencils borrowed from old mapwork,
Speaker 1: I returned to the river every day for two weeks.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I brought binoculars, sometimes nothing but my eyes and
Speaker 1: my weary old boots. I lodged my observations obsessively exact time, temperature,
Speaker 1: barometric pressure, or relic of meteorological training, when direction, the
Speaker 1: number and location of pebbles. I rotated my vantage upon
Speaker 1: the brooch down stream near the willow, at a flat
Speaker 1: rock beside the playground, under the market square shadow. Each day,
Speaker 1: under each new angle of sunlight or weather, the river
Speaker 1: station's pequiled or sure words and names, always shifting, but
Speaker 1: always familiar, sometimes in simple block letters, sometimes in the
Speaker 1: curving sharply hooks cript of old basque, once in almost
Speaker 1: Latin capitals, awkward and blocky, but unmistakable. The words linked
Speaker 1: to the tempo of town life. Never ran on gibberish,
Speaker 1: but names echoing those unwdding invitations. The painted banners hung
Speaker 1: for Gorgeaya the list of newly confirmed children at church.
Speaker 1: The festival itself loomed a week away. On the friday
Speaker 1: before I saw Gorgea inscribed in cobbled whites and brands
Speaker 1: of the far Bend, four days before the town council
Speaker 1: publicly announced final approval. Afterwards, people joked that the river
Speaker 1: approved the council, not the reverse. I made careful colored sketches,
Speaker 1: noting which words appeared where and when. I became more
Speaker 1: diligent about recording false posities of those occasions, when, however,
Speaker 1: intend I stared, the stones would resolve into nothing but randomness.
Speaker 1: On overcast days, the river offered no messages. After heavy rain,
Speaker 1: the stones hid themselves under the churning water. The more
Speaker 1: I tried to photograph the phenomenon, first with my old
Speaker 1: digital camera, then my phone, the more frustrated I became,
Speaker 1: though letters blurred into shapelessness, or the sun's glare destroyed
Speaker 1: the illusion. Even adjusting the angle and retacking the shot
Speaker 1: made no difference. The meaning dissolved in a camera's flat vision.
Speaker 1: Only sketches made on sight following shadows. Wella's form caught
Speaker 1: even a trace of what I saw. I became compulsive.
Speaker 1: I had to test if it was just me. Perhaps,
Speaker 1: as Ader joked, you only see what you hoped to see.
Speaker 1: So I brought Maelm with me, the young artist, after
Speaker 1: running into her while she was sketching a read wobbler
Speaker 1: perch by Sorgeant Punter. She grinned knowingly as I described
Speaker 1: my findings, shooting a laprin intocris blinds in her note book.
Speaker 1: Be careful, or the river will rate you in two,
Speaker 1: she said. I smiled, half taking it for a joke,
Speaker 1: half a warning. Her eyes glinted with a combination of
Speaker 1: mischief and gravity, not often seen in one so young.
Speaker 1: We stood together at the river bank. I gestured at
Speaker 1: the swirl of stones, asking if she saw names. She nodded,
Speaker 1: pointing to a clump of rocks that seemed to her
Speaker 1: but not to me, to spell me her mother's name.
Speaker 1: I knelt trace him with the finger where the shadows cross.
Speaker 1: In my mind it looked only like a rough m
Speaker 1: at best. We passed the notebook back and forth, comparing impressions.
Speaker 1: The more intently she looked, the more certain she became,
Speaker 1: while to my eye the arrangement constantly flickered from way
Speaker 1: to chaos. Perhaps the strangest revelation came when I compared
Speaker 1: my wrap sheaf of sketches from all the other observation points.
Speaker 1: Every spot with the clearest wares matched up by improbable
Speaker 1: coincidence with traditional gathering points or junctions where old town
Speaker 1: legends lingered. The stones spoke most eloquently with children launched
Speaker 1: boats at harvest, or where lovers had carved initiales into
Speaker 1: bark decades before I remembered the marker stone by the Woollaw.
Speaker 1: It worn crept a conscription and made another visit. Even
Speaker 1: kneeling in the wet the faded carvings provided no clear message.
Speaker 1: I traced the bumps with my fingers and realized I
Speaker 1: could have made out nearly any wood given enough imagination. Still,
Speaker 1: I wondered, had the rivers writing always brooded in these places,
Speaker 1: as secret texts woven into the land. The contradiction gnawed
Speaker 1: at me. Whenever I tried to mark stone positions with
Speaker 1: small labeled sticks, or used a gps at to precisely
Speaker 1: map alignments, the arrangement would seem to shift itself before
Speaker 1: my next visit, never brazenly, just enough for clarity to
Speaker 1: slip out of reach. If I left a marker which
Speaker 1: between two pebbles, the next day, it was gone, swept
Speaker 1: aside or buried in the silt, sometimes as stones themselves
Speaker 1: had skipped the short distance downstream inexplicably, or perhaps just
Speaker 1: as any river would move its bones slowly over time.
Speaker 1: Looking back through old weather load books, I noticed another
Speaker 1: thread of intrigue. After each severe stone, a flash flood here,
Speaker 1: a hailstorm there, new names would a pear days later,
Speaker 1: sometimes memorializing people or events that had not yet entered
Speaker 1: towned conversation. Once I found the Werbyser open hopes spelled
Speaker 1: out under the bridge just two days before the May
Speaker 1: is unexpected recovery from illness. Another time, a word in
Speaker 1: castilion appeared after a visit from Spanish cousins of Yesta,
Speaker 1: never before seen in that spot. The exceptions puzzled me
Speaker 1: most On several afternoons, when the language camp hosted French guests,
Speaker 1: A detected odd angular forms that looked vaguely like a
Speaker 1: rivia in the stones midway along the north bank. As
Speaker 1: soon as the visitors departed, the stones reverted to basque
Speaker 1: or familiar local references. I brought these findings to Man,
Speaker 1: the oldest woman in tam whose slowgate and sharp observations
Speaker 1: had grown legendary. We sat together at the bench closest
Speaker 1: to the council's herb garden, watching the kids run, a
Speaker 1: flask of tea between us. Mine smiled, her voice papery. Oh,
Speaker 1: the stones liked to play when I was small, we said,
Speaker 1: The river down answers. We never asked why, only who?
Speaker 1: For her, and perhaps for all of them. The phenomenon
Speaker 1: was not a puzzle, but a feature one taken for granted. Testing, marking, measuring,
Speaker 1: even trying to photograph seemed to have little effect. What
Speaker 1: stood out. Sketches made in city while actively watching and
Speaker 1: listening gave the clearest record. Photographs, video satellite images only
Speaker 1: left smudges drains of meaning. The more mechanistically it sought prove,
Speaker 1: the less remained The town's children, I realized had been
Speaker 1: prone for this. On the first of May, a group
Speaker 1: of boys waded into any deep channel, pointing out which
Speaker 1: jumble looked most like their names. Look there's an aniko,
Speaker 1: one shouted, No, that's mine. Another countered it seemed a game,
Speaker 1: but their parents, standing enter, smiled, an indulgent recognition of
Speaker 1: her right deeper than logic. That evening, as I wrestled
Speaker 1: with maps and color pencils, a thought occurred. These were
Speaker 1: remains corresponded almost perfectly to sights of communal importance, moments
Speaker 1: of collective notice. Their writing was strongest, were a rhythm
Speaker 1: of community throbs. But it also showed itself in anticipation
Speaker 1: before a festival was announced, before or baby had been named.
Speaker 1: Maybe it was all suggestion, I reason to send complex
Speaker 1: commune illusion, an elaborate act of predulece stoked by centuries
Speaker 1: of repetition and local legend. Maybe the stones truly moved
Speaker 1: only when the children secretly wished them to, or perhaps
Speaker 1: attention itself summoned the forms into existence. But the evidence
Speaker 1: compiled over weeks refused to narrow to one possibility. There
Speaker 1: was wilfulness in the phenomenon, something not quite explainable by
Speaker 1: psychology or weather, the River remembered before we did. Was
Speaker 1: this merely met for or warning or both? After all
Speaker 1: my careful charting, I had ended up with more uncertainty
Speaker 1: than confidence. This tension reached its peak on the Monday,
Speaker 1: four weeks after the Oak morning, in a low lit
Speaker 1: room above the bakery, I spread out my sketches and
Speaker 1: attempted to create a definitive record. I lined up column
Speaker 1: after column, Collum's labeled by debt, observer, weather vantage. What
Speaker 1: stood out blindingly was the lack of any lasting fixity,
Speaker 1: nothing repeated exactly. It hit me then, perhaps what I
Speaker 1: was seeking, though truth beneath the phenomenon, was itself a misunderstanding.
Speaker 1: I craved a mappable pattern, but the River's writing performed differently.
Speaker 1: It responded in some quiet, relational way to who was looking,
Speaker 1: to what the community felt or anticipated. The River was
Speaker 1: a kind of dialog, not a static object. That evening,
Speaker 1: at the monthly dinner round table at the back of
Speaker 1: the square's only restaurant, all former teachers and a few
Speaker 1: ex union men, I broached the topic, hopeful and a
Speaker 1: little embarrassed at my intensity. With a cup of char
Speaker 1: coffee in hand, I showed my composite map to the group.
Speaker 1: The commentary was brisp but revealing. I saw my own
Speaker 1: name on my birthday when I turned sixteen, muttered Michel,
Speaker 1: eyes flicking away as if to conceal pride. Never since,
Speaker 1: but only if you really look, added ederin pouring herself
Speaker 1: another glass of cider. It doesn't come for those who
Speaker 1: were just passing through. Eggerkine, older and sharper Tonight leaned
Speaker 1: in her voice, low, there's an old legend, the river
Speaker 1: writes for those who truly see it. If you don't look,
Speaker 1: you'll never notice. If you do, you might not like
Speaker 1: what you find. The others nodded, each with some memory,
Speaker 1: half admitted, half denied, of seeing their name or a
Speaker 1: word tied to a secret joy or sorrow reflected by
Speaker 1: the stones. Some believed the River's writing was strongest when
Speaker 1: life changed, births, marriages, deaths. Others thought it an art
Speaker 1: fact of childhood, a game that thinned with age but
Speaker 1: never vanished entirely. As the laughter and singing floated up,
Speaker 1: I glimpsed the possibility that had evaded me in measurement
Speaker 1: and mapping. What happened by the river was not unique
Speaker 1: to me, or even personal but collective. It was ever changing,
Speaker 1: inexplicable except within the framework of a long sheer memory.
Speaker 1: That shift. Seeing the phenomenon as an exchange, a dialogue,
Speaker 1: rather than an oddity to be pinned down, altered something fundamental.
Speaker 1: This wasn't a matter of trickery or faulty vision, nor
Speaker 1: was it a supernatural event. It was a dynamic woven
Speaker 1: from the intersection of eyes, language, place, and time. The
Speaker 1: river was neither mute nor all powerful. It was a
Speaker 1: participant in now remembering as vital as the town square
Speaker 1: or the rumblings of old psalms there in the sult
Speaker 1: that hush after desert. I let myself linger on the
Speaker 1: new question, not what appears, but how it is possible
Speaker 1: for the river, but but heaver mechanism, natural or communal,
Speaker 1: to continually inscribe the shifting story of its asaunda what
Speaker 1: do you eat together? Ask of our landscape that it
Speaker 1: answers as in such slippery script my mavromidem f. But
Speaker 1: my sense of what was possible had deepened. I was
Speaker 1: no longer mapping the river as a separate thing. I
Speaker 1: was somehow mapping a conversation. How many cups of overbrew coffee.
Speaker 1: How many unsolved columns in my working note book does
Speaker 1: it take before professional observer learns what not to look for.
Speaker 1: I sat back from the remains of the monthly dinner,
Speaker 1: the noise droning soft as a receding tide. I found
Speaker 1: my own silence bordering on satisfaction. Unexpected after months of
Speaker 1: chasing this river's elusive lexicon. The mystery now begged the
Speaker 1: deeper question, not the latters in the shallows, but the
Speaker 1: fact of their relentless presence within and between us. Still,
Speaker 1: the training of a life done dies slowly. I found
Speaker 1: myself awake just after three, Turning in the creaky guest
Speaker 1: mattress at Egg's Kyne's house. Shadows from the willow migrated
Speaker 1: across the wall, a swollen moon, proud silver from each
Speaker 1: passing cloud. I rose quietly, wrapping a showl around my
Speaker 1: shoulders and reaching for the battered field notebook on the table.
Speaker 1: I didn't intend to measure a record. I wanted simply
Speaker 1: to see what my memory couldn't reconstruct. It was in
Speaker 1: that pridumb blue empty street, echoing with my cautious fall,
Speaker 1: that I crossed the bridge once more. The river ran
Speaker 1: heavier after recent downpours. Still drowsing in the deeper threads,
Speaker 1: I let myself move beyond the vantage of precision. No
Speaker 1: carefully unlocked tripot, no ruler. Instead, I stood still and
Speaker 1: breed old bones, rooted, waiting to feel for something at
Speaker 1: the edges of attention. I was thinking of the old
Speaker 1: marker stone, nearly swallowed now by the springs growth, its
Speaker 1: description useless by light or touch. Had the carver intended
Speaker 1: it as a warning, a sea for future riddles, or
Speaker 1: simply a punctuation at the edge of town, Its presence
Speaker 1: seemed to tug gently at the intuition. I dared not
Speaker 1: name the landscape, but lived us, and in its patients
Speaker 1: answered us more subtly than language pyramids. I lingered beside
Speaker 1: the bridge. The bench is varnish, cold against my palm.
Speaker 1: A patch of glow began to split the sky. I
Speaker 1: saw only water, the royal and hush of current against
Speaker 1: the pebbles. No words revealed themselves this time I noticed,
Speaker 1: as I often did when expectation fell away, that my
Speaker 1: eyes wandered from the stones to the movement itself, the
Speaker 1: small vortices, the feathered wakes of valley morning dippers, the
Speaker 1: reflected cove of the bell tower, trembling with the river's play.
Speaker 1: The absence, too, was a kind of message one knows
Speaker 1: only starting to understand. If the river could write, it
Speaker 1: could also decline or leave blank. The event was not constant,
Speaker 1: nor even reliably repeatable for a single pair of eyes.
Speaker 1: The writing depended on more than sunlight or water levels
Speaker 1: or scribbled notes. It depended, perhaps on the willingness to
Speaker 1: attend with hope instead of need. By later that morning,
Speaker 1: the village was restless, with preparations for the upcoming festival.
Speaker 1: Banners unrolled from attics. Some one filled the square with
Speaker 1: the metallic thunder of scaffolding. In the bakery, flower dust
Speaker 1: rose and clouds. I found myself swept along by the
Speaker 1: communal bossle for once more participant than observer. Everyone's story
Speaker 1: seemed to circle back to the river, whether in remembering
Speaker 1: old processions or rehearsing which families had hosted the Poortry
Speaker 1: recitation last year. I stopped by Agiskinde's cassroom that afternoon,
Speaker 1: intending to return a borrowed book, but caught instead by
Speaker 1: a display of student paintings, most of them interpretations of
Speaker 1: the river and bridges rendered in every style, from sharp
Speaker 1: realism to wild abstraction. One from a child I didn't
Speaker 1: know showed stones forming the word of almer mother. I
Speaker 1: called egg askayne over. She shrugged, smiling gently. This one's
Speaker 1: never been by the river at dawn, but his grandmother
Speaker 1: tells the story every year. The passing on of observation,
Speaker 1: real or embroidered, scened as powerful as any physical occurrence.
Speaker 1: What would count is proof in a world built of
Speaker 1: such recided patterns. Objectivity didn't function here as it had
Speaker 1: in the National Cartographic Institute map room, where every contested
Speaker 1: border depended on a stack of measurements in one twenty
Speaker 1: five thousand projections. Here no two sketches matched completely, but
Speaker 1: every person knew in their own way what the ship
Speaker 1: should become. Prussia grew in me not to dismiss a rationalize,
Speaker 1: but to learn whether any one outside our habitual beliefs
Speaker 1: would see what we saw. I needed, almost to the
Speaker 1: point of impatience, to confrontation between now quietly enchanted routines
Speaker 1: and an outsider's blank glance. This tension, I realized, had
Speaker 1: been building from the moment a glimpse that first as
Speaker 1: Hu hadza it took the better part of a week
Speaker 1: to organize. Edis Kind had a friend, Noria, a linguished
Speaker 1: from don Oshe who's research into regional scripts was matched
Speaker 1: by deep skepticism of village miracles. At first, her applies
Speaker 1: to my invitation were brisk, almost dismissive. Pattern finding is
Speaker 1: ancient and mostly wishful, But I like rivers. Show me
Speaker 1: what ye think you see. She arrived at following Sunday beat,
Speaker 1: still muddy from a tour of a Navarrese monastery, back
Speaker 1: slumping open with notebooks, tablets, a drowne stass between charger cables.
Speaker 1: Her hair was clipped short, her laugh quick. I have
Speaker 1: high hopes for disproving you, she declared as we met
Speaker 1: at the bridge. But I'm always curious if this is
Speaker 1: another statue that cries every Easter. I'll o miapint. We
Speaker 1: started with the plan at her insistence, control viewing points,
Speaker 1: mixed groups of observers, ten locals, seven visitors, myself and
Speaker 1: reimmediating sketches and voice note records, and an attempt at
Speaker 1: direct imaging. Drone FLIV was set for the magic hour
Speaker 1: of the sun. Each person would be shown specific riverbank
Speaker 1: site at the established of prime times to see whether
Speaker 1: they reported names, symbols, or only random stones. The locals
Speaker 1: settled easily into the game. At the bridge, the children
Speaker 1: press up eagerly, some claiming to see the birthdays alarm
Speaker 1: with their names. Among adults, interpretations varied. Thus clearly back
Speaker 1: are alone. Someone whispered pointing at a clos ster of
Speaker 1: gray stones. Another disagreed, seeing nothing at all. Among the visitors,
Speaker 1: several bath speakers from Fatherfield, the mayor's cousin from San Sebastian,
Speaker 1: two French language students. Few claim to see anything meaningful,
Speaker 1: unless coaxed when prompted to look for words. Some reported
Speaker 1: clumsy English spelling's boat, others the shapes of animals, a
Speaker 1: kind of spontaneous roustch confounding expectations. Nuruer herself kept a
Speaker 1: running tally, alternating between amusement and silent note taking. After
Speaker 1: the first session, we gathered at the market cafe to
Speaker 1: compare impressions contacts Prime's perception. Neeri observed the stones didn't change,
Speaker 1: but half the townsfooks saw references to tonight's festival. Visitors,
Speaker 1: even fluent Basques, reported mostly random shapes or mistakes. If
Speaker 1: everyone expects the river to speak. They hear it, but
Speaker 1: accountered the patents Chu Chief have charted differences that can
Speaker 1: be handwaighed by suggestion alone, words, their pressage events before
Speaker 1: they happen, sudden script changes after storms not just share expectation.
Speaker 1: Perhaps neer conceded, but per Dolly is stubborn, and the
Speaker 1: physical arrangements, to the best of my drone notes show
Speaker 1: only minor ordinary rearrangements never led a perfect script, at
Speaker 1: least from above. She flicked through the drun's video jumbles
Speaker 1: of what stones the occasional heron hardly a could pel
Speaker 1: griffer cipher. I press further, showing her ma hand draw
Speaker 1: on sketches. But the only reliable record is this. No camera,
Speaker 1: no satellite, not even your drone can document it as clearly.
Speaker 1: It only appears a script when sketch, not when photograph.
Speaker 1: When you attend by hand, by eye, it reveals itself
Speaker 1: the flat image. It is out the living context. Noria
Speaker 1: pursed her lips. Or perhaps the act of drawing fixes
Speaker 1: your intentions so strongly it manufactures a pattern. Still, I'd
Speaker 1: be a poor scientist if ignored a consistent anomaly. She
Speaker 1: offered the ghost of a smile. Why do your sketches
Speaker 1: from dozens of sessions cluster at the same sights every time?
Speaker 1: That evening the rains started up again, a fitful, heavy
Speaker 1: spring shower that battered the last cherry blossoms and sent
Speaker 1: most of us scurrying indoors. The river below, cherning with
Speaker 1: silt and debris, seemed then interested in revealing secrets. But
Speaker 1: that night, as the wind howled through the Lurts's narrow valley,
Speaker 1: the village itself seemed to strain a little towards something
Speaker 1: about to be said. The next morning brought fresh rumor.
Speaker 1: Before sunrise, Mines Grand of eight years old, missing her
Speaker 1: front teeth and brimming with mischief, had claimed to see
Speaker 1: her family's name on the stones, but also, somehow another
Speaker 1: two names entwined in the place where only one was expected.
Speaker 1: By mid morning, whispers ran through the tent square. Twins
Speaker 1: had been born to Inhoa at the far end of
Speaker 1: the market street, and whose no one except the matron
Speaker 1: Midwoif had yet declared. But the river it was claimed,
Speaker 1: announced both name's ode and I by storm and river
Speaker 1: side by side, inscribed in water and stone before word
Speaker 1: its bread. A ripple of luft swept through the bakery
Speaker 1: and cafay. The river knows someone crowed, more amused than not.
Speaker 1: Noria's eyebrows rose less with surprised than cautious delight. She
Speaker 1: accompanied me to the bank, checking princes in tracks. The
Speaker 1: arrangement of the stones, as ever, betrayed, no interfering hand,
Speaker 1: no trick. The phenomenon awaited only those willing to glimpse it. Later,
Speaker 1: at lunch, a children gathered savoring the now well established
Speaker 1: game if you tell the river your secret, it will
Speaker 1: write it when you're not looking. Their voices braided together,
Speaker 1: teasing and playful. For them, the river's writing constituted a
Speaker 1: kind of challenges shared scavenger hunt. I wondered which secret
Speaker 1: each child wished to see appear, and whether the river
Speaker 1: would accommodate them all or only those sincerest in their hope.
Speaker 1: Over the following days, ne rear and arrare more small experiments.
Speaker 1: The results reinforced what we both already suspected. Locals, though
Speaker 1: steeped in the accumulated backgrounds of meaning, more often so
Speaker 1: pertinent names, words that made sense to the moment of
Speaker 1: season outside a saw broader, less specific forums, or nothing
Speaker 1: special yet even among locals. What one person saw was
Speaker 1: rarely identical to another's vision. Each narrated the river's script
Speaker 1: back to their own family law, and no reas urging.
Speaker 1: I come through the town's archives at chiley, lined some
Speaker 1: walled room beneath the council hall, pages of withered ink die,
Speaker 1: ground sketched on animals, gain faded festival invitations, all stacked
Speaker 1: in organized chaos. I found more than I had hoped.
Speaker 1: Seventeenth century diaries spoke of the River's tantin of words
Speaker 1: in water, references that seemed too casual for true miracle,
Speaker 1: yet too consistent to dismiss his metaphor. A battle chief
Speaker 1: from the Midminess one thousand seven, hundreds of priests downitated
Speaker 1: tow mapshure notations at specific bends, with cryptic GLOFs beside them.
Speaker 1: My heart lurched as I recognized the bank where I
Speaker 1: had seen gorgias spelled out weeks before the priest simply
Speaker 1: marked its stone that gossips otter's match sites known to
Speaker 1: day by local legend, the place where a lover's left
Speaker 1: bribon tokens were heard as led to bring flocks across
Speaker 1: shallow forwards. The documents confirmed, if nothing else, the deep
Speaker 1: sircularity of our observation. The river had always been more
Speaker 1: than a boundary, more than a drain from meltwater. It
Speaker 1: was a participant in the story telling of the town,
Speaker 1: its features, revered and named, its oddities embraced with a
Speaker 1: ripe pride. Even a nineteenth century traveler sketched the river's script,
Speaker 1: noting how after a turbulent season, the patterns seemed to
Speaker 1: spell my own name, not in my language, but theirs.
Speaker 1: I shared these findings with Neria as we sat in
Speaker 1: the shade outside the bakery. Her tone softened. He realized
Speaker 1: what this suggests. That the phenomenon ad apse updates not
Speaker 1: a trick of fixed stones or hidden markers, but something alive,
Speaker 1: evolving the conevention of water, stone and story. Together we
Speaker 1: tried to formalize an answer. Ne Rea outline possible causes
Speaker 1: classic perretaliat reinforced by legendary repetition, some geomorphic patent subsoles
Speaker 1: structure channeling pebbles into partly regular lines, perhaps even a
Speaker 1: kind of collective performance from conscious but persistent, where children
Speaker 1: and elders nudge meaning along by gossip and memory. She
Speaker 1: even speculated on the brain's instinct to create order out
Speaker 1: of randomness, of theory I once would have accepted without question. I,
Speaker 1: from my parts, suggested a feedback lips stranger than either
Speaker 1: simple illusion or direct intention. The more we seek the
Speaker 1: river's story, the more palpably the river response, not in
Speaker 1: the literal action, but in the landscape's readiness to be interpreted.
Speaker 1: Attention fed back on itself by centuries of belief and anticipation,
Speaker 1: forms its own reality, not one the camera can fix,
Speaker 1: but one the community sustains in rhythm and voice. It
Speaker 1: does it matter, Norias said finally, whether it's real in
Speaker 1: the scientific sense. The river's right and organized as memory
Speaker 1: reunites the town around small marvels. Maybe that's the most
Speaker 1: important perfever, if it dissolves when we try to hold
Speaker 1: it still. I thought of mapping, how every finished chart
Speaker 1: is both faithful and un faithful, reducing a lived well
Speaker 1: to measured lines. Perhaps I was coming to realize the
Speaker 1: urge to map was itself creative, not just representational. Every
Speaker 1: time I drew a line or check declared a stone board,
Speaker 1: they named the landscape thickened without a reality. In a
Speaker 1: spiral of my notes, I started a new section, labeling
Speaker 1: it unmappable. Here are transcrired stories recounted by the elders,
Speaker 1: sketches of symbols that at first it seemed only decorative
Speaker 1: in the mirror by the square. These stories agreed on
Speaker 1: one thing. The River's writing intensified at moments of communal flock's, marriages, departures, losses, celebrations.
Speaker 1: It was as if the town's shifting sense of itself
Speaker 1: required a mirror, and the river, reliable in wetness and unpredictability,
Speaker 1: was willing to serve on a cross morning that week,
Speaker 1: the festival began in Earnest. The bridge was wreathed in bunting.
Speaker 1: Quiet practiced in the church court yard, their harmonies carrying
Speaker 1: over water. As dusk approach tenspeople streamed to the bank's
Speaker 1: children skiffing baker's ferrying trees of cake and bread, musicians
Speaker 1: warming reeds and drum skins. In the hush before the speeches,
Speaker 1: when people pressed along the river's edge, pointing and craning
Speaker 1: for a glimpse of whatever marvel might occur, I felt
Speaker 1: the tightness in my chest, the anticipation of something coalescing
Speaker 1: across the water. The scattered stones lay half submerged. The
Speaker 1: last rays caught them in a savereign glow. I waited,
Speaker 1: notebooks suspended in my hand, heart slowing in a hush
Speaker 1: for a moment, a single elongated heart beach. It seemed
Speaker 1: every eye tended the river, expectation braided with memory and
Speaker 1: the laughter of old friends. There in the shallowest reach
Speaker 1: by the north bank, the stones blurred, the ripple smute,
Speaker 1: and a word formed barely. They but collectively recognized. It
Speaker 1: was not a name, not this time, not a festival title,
Speaker 1: not even a greeting or a wish, but a word
Speaker 1: in the oldest grip of the town, formed briefly from
Speaker 1: the half lit stones, alkabizitza coexistence. The children chrused it,
Speaker 1: some is pronouncing, others giggling. The elders nodded gravely or
Speaker 1: with resigned amusement, as if to say, see, the river
Speaker 1: knows how to speak for us all. Neuria raise her
Speaker 1: phone to record, her mouth opened just enough to let
Speaker 1: in the river song. She caught nothing but the glint
Speaker 1: of water on stone, no decipherable letters, no evidence beyond
Speaker 1: the sound of the crowd. But we standing together at
Speaker 1: the margin, felt changed. The words spoke as much for
Speaker 1: the town's stubborn endurance as for the gentle entanglement of story, water,
Speaker 1: and attention that had brought us there. That evening, I
Speaker 1: walked slowly home in the dark, watching the river's surface
Speaker 1: wabble with lantern light. It no longer seemed that the
Speaker 1: place was mine to observe a map, but that included
Speaker 1: me roriting itself each day, attentive to whoever dared to
Speaker 1: look close enough together alone. In the days that followed,
Speaker 1: my need for conclusion slackened. I found myself less interested
Speaker 1: in fixing evidence than in listening to the shape of
Speaker 1: possibility beneath each ripple and stone, whether or not the
Speaker 1: river could be proven to write it had written me
Speaker 1: my questions, my routines, my fleeting place in its own
Speaker 1: un sounded narrative. A week after the festival, with the ethic,
Speaker 1: with humidity in the last cake crun swept from the square,
Speaker 1: I walked the old route to the footbridge's dusk fell
Speaker 1: in my pocket a single blank notebook, the kind once
Speaker 1: reserved for neat bounded maps, now open to whatever the
Speaker 1: evening offered. The river slips off the past, its stones
Speaker 1: pulls bright, then dim as the sun moved behind the
Speaker 1: bell tower. No names appeared, no words in water, only
Speaker 1: the flicker of swallows, the distance on of some one's radio,
Speaker 1: the old willow dipping roots into the current. I leaned
Speaker 1: against the bridge rail, letting my eyes lose focus, until
Speaker 1: the world shimmered easier around the edges. I I remember
Speaker 1: my father, so many years gone, pointing up into summer
Speaker 1: CODs to see there's a hare and a hand, and
Speaker 1: always another story. The luzon, then, is now to look
Speaker 1: not for certainty, but for invitation, to let the landscape
Speaker 1: pride itself. With me folded quietly inside and standing there,
Speaker 1: I wondered more would delight them with lost How many
Speaker 1: rivers across the world are patiently writing us stories on
Speaker 1: our head, waiting still for one more attentive gaze. And
Speaker 1: that is the end. Thank you for listening, and I
Speaker 1: will see you in the next one.