I have been dreaming of one river for over a month, a river that remains mysterious, but it is always dark, its current powerful. Sometimes I am in the pull of that current and moving with great speed. I am never afraid. I cannot explain that.
I love the ocean in Maine where the granite coast and islands always provoke wilderness in my imagination, a coast that promises to crack bones and crack open wonder in equal measure, but the rivers I have known are somehow softer and more reliable vehicles of memory. At the same time rivers also make a kind of dreaming for me inside the dreams of others.
Growing up, we swam in the Schuylkill and the Tulpehocken. In high school, a group of us made a war movie using the Tully and a covered bridge.
Four of us took canoes down the West Branch of the Susquehanna during Easter weekend in March of 1970, 2 months before graduation. It was cold. We built fires at night and told stories, and I think each of us wondered what would come next. My friend remembers a dozen trout suspended in a deep pool. He remembers the long canoes. There were bends where the trees so blanketed the river, and the silence was so complete, we could have been floating through primeval time.
I can call out the names of rivers and streams whose waters have splashed me – the French Creek, whose recesses I’ve walked for 50 years, the Delaware, the Manatawny, the Perkiomen, the Brandywine, the Pecos in New Mexico and Owl Creek in Myerstown where we played near blue pools of arsenic residue. I paused near the River Suck meandering through Ballinasloe. We camped next to it for two days in the summer of ‘76.
I remember canoeing on the Madison in the summer of ’77, dazzled by the light, by all of the West, by images of Lewis and Clark.
When I was 19 or 20, a group of us swam in a deep, intensely blue stream near a small village to the south of Ciudad Victoria. We washed off the dirt and sweat of days of work digging a new well. We never learned its name. I can see that blue even now.
I have walked along and looked into the Tiber and Thames, the Arno and Seine. I have looked at homes on the Allagash, the St. John’s and a tiny creek near Truchas. I have never seen it, but I know all about the snow “softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.” I have never seen it, but the Xanthos is alive in me: “But the other half were packed in the silver-whirling river, /into its foaming depths they tumbled, splashing, flailing—/the plunging river roaring, banks echoing, roaring back/and the men screamed, swimming wildly, left and right, /spinning round in the whirlpools.” I have stood knee deep in the Little Big Horn and looked up at the bluff some of those doomed 7th Calvary troopers tried to climb. The water shone, brilliant, blinding.
Rivers exude purpose. They promise renewal. They beckon our youth; they promise our end. All moving water is beautiful. Their names are rising up as I remember.
