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Water’s Way
-reflections on awareness
Video images from the natural world, spoken word and music from Celtic, to American folk, to classical, coalesce in an enigmatic evocation of the fluid in Water’s Way, a documentary from WSKG-TV.
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| Looking closely at flowing water can be a hypnotic experience; the subtle shifts and eddies mesmerize. |
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| Written and produced by former WSKG staffer Tom Milligan, Water's Way is conceived less as a traditional documentary than as a piece of art segmented into several sections. "You might learn the odd new fact about water, but it’s the emotional response it’s trying to evoke, the way a painting does. The point is to look at water closely, let ourselves feel what looking at it does to us, reflect on the awareness it evokes, and on the ways in which, as some have suggested, water is a kind of sense organ for the earth." |
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The images, collected from roughly half the counties WSKG serves, strive to capture the fragility and power of water in the natural world in all the seasons, seeking to remind us that it is water that dissolves all things even as it’s creating all things, responding to the same force that shaped the first moments of the universe. |
| At the boundary, where the cold air meets the relatively warm water, water vapor becomes visible; the kingfisher is out hunting early this morning. |
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| Music for the program is by Harp & Harmony, an ensemble of acoustic musicians from the Utica area whose work the producer had heard live and in recorded form on several occasions. "I hadn’t heard the music when I was collecting these images, but they fit together so well, it was synchronicity. Truly, there are no coincidences." |
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| Water wears away stone, dissolves its locked-up nutrients, carries them to the plants which sustain us all. |
Vortices form in response to obstructions in the current underneath the surface. And what question might this vortex be asking? |
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| Air obeys the same laws of motion as water; the spray from the falls at floodtide shows something of the complexity of flow within the borders the stream. |
The calligraphy of moonlight on the ruffled surface of the slow-moving stream. |
| Peggy Spencer, the ensemble’s harpist, arranger, and sometimes-composer, also collected hours of natural sound from the Shawangunk Nature Preserve, Harp & Harmony’s home base, which enhances the soundtrack of Water’s Way. |
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Water's Way was edited by Chris Hopkins, and Peter Bombar, Chief Engineer, did the audio post-production. Tom Milligan’s earlier productions include Seventh Generation: What Columbus Learned, Nights at the Opera, and The Crystal City.
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Clouds do not fall because they have never risen; they are made of tiny droplets of water which have condensed around tiny fragments of dust in the air. |
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A string of vortices spins out continuously
from the flow of water around rock. |
Sometimes the wind will show us forms
quite like the forms we see in water. |
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