Descriptive River

Once again, transcribing from my college honors English notebook, a passage regarding a river.  This was part of a 3-part assignment, which was to take an object and write a paragraph about it from the descriptive, expository, and narrative viewpoints.  This one was, in my opinion, the most successful.

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Nestled in the lush fold of two meeting mountains is a river.  It is not the sluggish puddling river of the South, nor the crashing roaring river of the Rockies.  It is not even a river, really, it's mostly like a grown-up creek.  It has its roots deep in the high country, where miniscule trickles of pure rainwater dodge pebbles and leaves in their tiny gullies to join and create, eventually, this river.  Its waters are biting cold and sweet to taste, and so clear the rocky bed seems as if viewed through glass.  A watery stillness pervades the river's ravine, and nature seems achingly harmonious as a thrush parts the air with a liquid warble.  Giant trees lean over the tumbling waters, mingling their branches high above in a conversation of green peace and light.  Rays of sunlight find their way through this ancient canopy to dapple the banks and the river.  The earth exudes an old smell, one of many autumns past, of lives created, of visitors come and gone.  The river itself seems timeless.

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Note: at the time I had no idea what a thrush sounded like.  For all I know, they croak.

Something tells me there was a word count restriction for these assignments, because I could have been a heck of a lot more florid in my prose than this if given half a chance and a few more minutes.  Shoot, there are hardly any big words in there at all!

The unconductor

put a suit on him, and BINGO!

 'He moves in a slow measured stride into the lecture hall, his brown herringbone suit fitting loosely on this stooped body.  His greasy balding head is filled with what he knows is the carefully prepared discourse for the day.  As he approaches the podium, he clears his throat timidly and adjusts the horn-rimmed spectacles crookedly perched on the narrow bridge of his nose.

Having completed his preparatory steps, he opens his mouth and begins to speak.  The voice is brown, not a nice deep coffee brown, but rather a dunnish color, flat and devoid of life.  It spills on and on, oozing stickily into the minds of his listeners.  The voice engulfs and stretches seconds into minutes, and minutes into clouds periods of no-time.  The voice is a tragedy, a sickly imitation of normality, a parody of the profession.  Things like this voice should not be allowed to linger on, no matter how important or vital the subject it is slaughtering.  Broken only by the annoyance of an ill-placed 'uh,' it drones on, placing the more somatonic students in a blissful stupor.  When at long last the awful gray noxious voice halts, the listeners are left with a sense of disbelief, and a knowledge of relief to realize they are 50 minutes closer to the end of the year, the end of the voice, the end of the professor who belongs to it.'

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What?: A short descriptive writing piece from 5-minute writing in English Honors class many a moon ago.Somewhere around 1982, when I was 20.

Who? This was a real teacher, and I loathed him.

Impression?:  It's fairly terrible, but some bits are good.  And no, I have no idea if 'somatonic' is a word.  If it isn't, it should be.  Also, I changed a couple of things that are really awful in the original.  BECAUSE I CAN!

Thus endeth the lesson.