Stand Here
dalemccurry April 1st, 2007
Art can be found anywhere. It lives and breathes in the beholder’s eye.
In downtown Springfield, Missouri, at a site once stripped of both nature’s chaos and human structure, there is a small park with a small river. It is not a river in the natural sense––no Ozarks limestone lines its course, neither sun perch nor crawdads dwell in its waters. If God’s work, it is achieved at the hands of artisans under divine employ. It stretches barely 100 yards from headwaters to destination before recycling to its original source using hidden pumps rather than evaporation and rainfall. It is compact and precise in its construction. It is a haiku of a river called Ozarks Stream by Wet designs of Universal City, California.
While angular and somewhat metropolitan in design, while hewn of cut as flat and as narrowly defined as the trimmest laptop, while slipping through the shadows of towering modern structures, Ozarks Stream recalls the sand bars and gravel bars, the ripples and eddies, the rope-swing plunges and the inner-tube driftings of a simpler Ozark Life.
Bernard Wrangler, Tom Robbins’ red-headed outlaw in Still Life with Woodpecker, claims poets remember our dreams for us. I wonder if that’s not the calling of all artists.
Ozarks Stream of Jordon Valley Park is not a stream it is art, yet a stream at heart. It slurps in the spirit of a stream and burps out a unique product, yet one with a familiar feel. It oozes order and mayhem in random yet ultimately equal doses. It tumbles and stumbles, slips and slides, over edges of stone––not God’s stone, mind you, yet stone just the same. It bumbs and grinds and dances with light. It sings its falsetto song and patters out a primal rhythm to an ancient tune. It delivers a healthy serving of joy and sets me to weeping in a certain, near-sacred corner of my soul. It whispers to me: secrets it could not possibly know.
It welcomes a body home.
Ozarks Stream is not a stream: it is art. It rearranges the mind and redefines what it means to be a creek––to view a creek. It says: Yes, there were rivers, fine rivers, in your past … and those yet to come. But what if? Try this. Stand here––where you are.
See? … It’s lovely.
- The Other Side of the Fence
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