I
Oxbow
Oxbow
At seventeen, I left home. Through the window of my first car, I watched the mountains of Salt Lake City melt into the horizon. Raindrops gathered on the glass. Single points massing into wispy veins, combined further into long streams across my view. My parents sat next to each other, plotting the course to an inevitable fork which would divert us from the path we'd shared for the majority of my life. Flanked by boxes of things, a red, white, and green mountain bike strapped carefully to the back of our car shuddered nervously in the wind.- A few weeks later, a familiar whirring primed the dark lecture hall of INTRO TO GEOLOGY for imminent illumination. With a click, the room filled with light, the image of a bird's-eye view of a river, animating frame by frame to reveal the slow meander of its path over time. “The oxbow lake…”, announced the professor, “...begins its life as a small curve. Over time water erodes its outside edge, while depositing sediment on its inside bank. This effect compounds the water's speed and sediment's displacement, until it inevitably loops back onto itself, shortcutting its former path to form a new body of water.”