Chapter VI — Raconteur Road
Flux — What flows when gradients demand.
A flux is the answer to the dare. The wind that smooths the dune. The river that carries the silt. The truck moving south because there is somewhere south of here that is not yet here. The photograph is a flux frozen — one quarter of one second in which everything that was flowing kept flowing without us.
Mara River, the crossing
They mass on the bank for days, working up the nerve, and then one of them jumps and the dam breaks — a thousand animals pouring into the brown water at once, swimming, drowning, climbing out the far side to keep walking toward grass they cannot see yet. Nobody decides. The herd just spills.
A migration is a million animals all being wrong about who is in charge.
Okavango, the river that never reaches the sea
Most rivers run to the ocean. This one runs into the desert and gives up — fanning out across the sand into a thousand channels until the Kalahari drinks the last of it. For a few months a year the driest place on earth becomes the wettest, simply because the water arrived.
Not all rivers are going somewhere. Some are just going.