hawk on the river

Some writing and illustration from this week:
…As a child of cities, when I reached the stage of youthful yearning in life, I yearned for wild places. At the height of Providence’s industrial strength, the network of rivers that met in the center of the city had been paved over to support rail tracks and roads. When I arrived in the 1990s the downtown rivers had been uncovered and relocated, but an infrastructure of mills and water ways that our human economy no longer had an urgent interest in maintaining still stood. The disciplined work of grooming the natural environment was now directed at the plantings and curb ornamentations of shopping plazas. SO If you walked long enough in any direction and looked for overgrown waterways, a sort of crooked wild experience was always close at hand, and somehow comforting.
BELOW: Sketch from photos of a hawk that was seen eating a fish from the river near the mall.