Take a walk down a river road
Take it in the morning light
I promise by the end of the day
Things are gonna be alright
Take a walk down a river road
Let the pain just disappear
It’s a great big world
I’m glad that you’re here
Jimmy LaFave, River Road
When you work with water, you have to know and respect it. When you labor to subdue it, you have to understand that one day it may rise up and turn all your labors to nothing. For what is water, children, which seeks to make all things level, which has no taste or color of its own, but a liquid form of Nothing? And what are the Fens, which so imitate in their levelness the natural disposition of water, but a landscape which, of all landscapes, most approximates to Nothing? Every Fenman secretly concedes this; every Fenman suffers now and then the illusion that the land he walks over is not there, is floating … And every Fen-child, who is given picture-books to read in which the sun bounces over mountain tops and the road of life winds through heaps of green cushions, and is taught nursery rhymes in which persons go up and down hills, is apt to demand of his elders: Why are the Fens flat?
Graham Swift, Waterland
Yesterday, we took a drive down through the river valley that lies at the heart of Humptulips County. Deep down this is an alluvial land, a land formed first by the forces of nature, then scoured clean by titanic glaciers, and now thoroughly and continuously washed by rain, rivers and tide. This, like the Fens of Britain, is one of those parts of the world where land and water embrace one another with rare passion; where their coupling produces a sort of fragile beauty that can only be seen on a trip down a river road.
The river is high but not currently at flood stage, yet water lies everywhere throughout the valley, the product of seemingly endless days of snow, rain and wet and an almost complete lack of sunshine. At times, the river’s course was ill-defined, the lack of definition created by a variety of temporary lakes and fens which might have been pools fed by the river, or not, depending upon their proximity to the river bed, or, perhaps, were nothing more than hollows and low points in the valley bottom incongruously submerged beneath an extremely high water table. These are the places which are simultaneously land and not-land, which seesaw in a rhythm coupled to that of our seasons. In one such temporary lake, Helen spotted a cormorant and we wondered if it knew that only pumpkins and other crops, not fish, typically inhabit this particular spot for a majority of the year.
And just as land and water seem to change places in our county with facility, the horizon can often shift and lower to a point underneath the surrounding hilltops on days such as yesterday. Yesterday’s horizon was one such: a serrated horizon confused by trailing spumes of water vapor which were either fog emanating from the forests below in order to serve as ropes anchoring the clouds in place, or recently birthed cloudlets hovering slightly above the forests while still tied to their progenitors by vapory umbilical chords, impishly pretending to be smoke from forest fires that couldn’t possibly burn in such weather.
This totality – water commingled with the land and coupled with a variable, aqueous horizon – made yesterday’s trip through the valley a trip through a water world. The impression of water was so profound, that we found ourselves wondering, before our arrival, whether the road across the valley to one of our favorite lunch spots might be impassable. We quickly realized, however, that we would have heard if the river had been in flood and the road impassable, and that the very fact that the land was covered only by a patchwork of water and fen, instead of a turgid grey sea, was proof that the road would prove passable – as it did.
And so it was that our usually humble river valley was turned into a place of majesty and mystery, a magic land through which an ordinary drive became a wondrous adventure. The river valley is just as often a place of green moods, a place of seemingly sempiternal Spring where peace is a constant state of mind. But not yesterday. Yesterday, the valley’s mood was that of a glowering troll awaiting an unwary traveler to stop and become its lunch; yesterday was a trip through Tolkien’s Mirkwood on the way to the Lonely Mountain; yesterday was a voyage with Huck and Jim down the Mississippi on a raft to an uncertain future.
This morning as I write in the safety of my library, I do so under a sky from which large snowflakes are steadily falling. In the last half hour the ground has become covered and, on this day which is exactly four days prior to the official advent of Spring, it is once again Winter in Humptulips County. Once again, water, this time in its solid state, predominates and covers the earth. The snowfall shows no present sign of stopping, but certainly by noon, in this time of seasonal between, the day will have evolved into something less wintry and more Spring-like.
And while we complain at times about all of the water that surrounds and falls upon us in its various, endless forms, those of us resident in Humptulips County know that the greenness which nurtures our souls is nurtured, in turn, by water in its multitudinous forms, and no matter what we may say about all of that water to those of you who are so unfortunate as not to live here, we always bless its presence. For we know that it is far more than the Nothing Mr. Swift postulates; for as mead was to the ancients, water, in its manifold forms, is our stuff of life.
