On Rivers

Perhaps it is to prepare to hear someday the music of the spheres that I am always turning my ears to the music of streams. There is indeed a music in streams, but it is not for the hurried. It has to be loitered by and imagined. Or imagined toward, for it is hardly for men at all. Nature has a patient ear. To her the slowest funeral march sounds like a jig. She is satisfied to have the notes drawn out to the lengths of days or weeks or months. Small variations are acceptable to her, modulations as leisurely as the opening of a flower.

The stream is full of stops and gates. Here it has piled up rocks in its path, and pours over them into a tiny pool it has scooped at the foot of its fall. Here it has been dammed by a mat of leaves caught behind a fallen limb. Here it must force a narrow passage, here a wider one. Tomorrow the flow may increase or slacken, and the tone will shift. In an hour or a week that rock may give way, and the composition will advance by another note. Some idea of it may be got by walking slowly along and nothing the changes as one passes from one little fall or rapid to another. But this is a highly simplified and diluted version of the real thing, which is too complex and widespread ever to be actually heard by us. The ear must imagine an impossible patience in order to grasp even the unimaginableness of such music.

But the creation is musical, and this is a part of its music, as birdsong is, or the words of poets.   

Wendell Berry - A Native Hill.

The wind gusted heavily around the pale trunk of the cottonwood in whose roots I’d taken shelter. I drank beer and watched the river flutter and move with the wind on top of its own perennial motions. The water there came down the shallow rocks and boulders in a fast riffle and turned as it entered a deep corner pool that smoothed out and moved along at a slow pace. I smelled fish every time I lifted the bottle to my lips. He’d been a nice Brown, the size that fights you into your arm. I caught him, killed him, set his golden spotted body alongside the brews in a pocket pool and then sat down in the roots of the tree to watch the river go by. There were more fish in the river. I knew I’d catch them, but it seems at times that the best course of movement and thought is to sit and watch for awhile, especially after setting some violence against the river.

The rock had cracked the trout’s skull with a single hit. I’m not sure what possessed me to keep him. I hadn’t planned on it or against it. Maybe it was the hard weather, the heavy winds and low clouds. Maybe it was the timing, the unfrozen river, the renewal of it, the first taste of its waters, and the first fish, the first born so to speak. Or maybe I just felt violent and hungry. There wasn’t a depth of thought involved and afterwards it seemed natural to wait a moment in the lee afforded by the tree and watch the river go by.

It is in this way that you come to know a place.