three rivers

River Profile
September 22, 1966
W.H. Auden

Our body is a moulded river
—Novalis

Out of a bellicose fore-time, thundering
head-on collisions of cloud and rock in an
up-thrust, crevasse-and-avalanche, troll country,
     deadly to breathers,

it whelms into our picture below the melt-line,
where tarns lie frore under frowning cirques, goat-bell,
wind-breaker, fishing-rod, miner’s-lamp country,
     already at ease with

the mien and gestures that become its kindness,
in streams, still anonymous, still jumpable,
flows as it should through any declining country
     in probing spirals.

Soon of a size to be named and the cause of
dirty in-fighting among rival agencies,
down a steep stair, penstock-and-turbine country,
     it plunges ram-stam,

to foam through a wriggling gorge incised in softer
strata, hemmed between crags that nauntle heaven,
robber-castle, tow-rope portage-way country,
     nightmare of merchants.

Disembogueing from foot-hills, now in hushed meanders,
now in riffling braids, it vaunts across a senile
plain, well-entered, chateau-and-ciderpress country,
     its regal progress

gallanted for a while by quibbling poplars,
then by chimneys: led off to cool and launder
retort, steam-hammer, gasometer country,
     it changes color.

Polluted, bridged by girders, banked with concrete,
now it bisects a polyglot metropolis,
ticker-tape, taxi, brothel, footlights country,
     à-la-mode always.

Broadening or burrowing to the moon’s phases,
turbid with pulverized wastemantle, on through
flatter, duller, hotter, cotton-gin country,
     it scours, approaching

the tidal mark where it puts off majesty,
disintegrates, and through swamps of a delta,
punting-pole, fowling-piece, oyster-tongs country,
     wearies to its final

act of surrender, effacement, atonement
in a huge amorphous aggregate no cuddled
attractive child ever dreams of, non-country,
     image of death as

a spherical dew-drop of life. Unlovely
monsters, our tales believe, can be translated
too, even as water, the selfless mother
     of all especials.

Then again,
T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages 

I do not know much about gods; but I think the river
Is a strong brown god -- sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in the cities -- ever, however, implacable,
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and
        waiting.

Thirdly, more words to less effect, on a specific river and my own obsessions.

Kalama 1991

On the way down I-5 from Canada towards Portland, you pass the chimneys of a paper and pulp factory, then an exit for the Kalama river. It seems implausible that you can reach a real living river from an interstate, but then, there's probably a freeway on the way to anywhere if you go back far enough. I slept last night in Vancouver, so I haven't travelled far at all. On the other hand, it was five thousand miles' drive to Vancouver; before that, seventeen years and several continents since I first wanted to see these rivers.

Happy in the contemplation of a whole day to spend on a new stream, I roll down the window, memory and anticipation persuading me to expect the startling new clarity of morning near water. The paper mill's fume sensibly reminds me that the morning may be new made but the world is not.

The first stop is a pool beneath the hatchery outlet. The chinook salmon returning home tend to accumulate here, sensing the concrete rearing ponds of their youth in the narrow trickle spilling over the gravel. By this time the main run is over, the latecomers that are still alive are old and black, their first ocean strength spent in the weeks of waiting for rain. Their expectations are confounded by a stream which never rises high enough to run up. They line up in the shallows below the outlet, surging away under a strong roll of water when some fisherman comes too close. Some half dozen fishermen are here this midweek day, presenting a variety of salmon flies to the fish that cruise over the sunlit weeds and algae, their massive shapes clear in silhouette. Salmon will take a fly out of aggression, or perhaps some dim memory of river feeding: but these fish, in the bright clear water, are indifferent to all blandishments. I don't expect or want to catch one, but I like to see them, a mystery for once visible and present.

Further up under the uncomplicated sun, more salmon are at their necessary business. These have withstood the delusions of the hatchery pool, instead making a difficult way up through the shallow runs, thrashing over stones in dazzling splashes. The smaller, brighter female fish hangs over the hollow she has dug in the gravel, surrounded by the dark looming males. Her pale spotted back blends into the brown of the stream bed, dappled with light gray shadows of ripples chasing over the surface. As she twists to beat against the hollow, scraping it deeper still, the silver of her flank flashes and winks out again, a kind of semaphore in an unreadable code. The males lie a little below and behind, queuing in an order determined by aggression and muscle. The smaller fish attempt to dart ahead, but are knocked aside by rushes from the bigger males. I watch this old battle appearing and vanishing again beneath the patches of rough water swept over the scene by gusts of wind: then stand up, moving faster than I meant to, but the fish flinch only slightly, the female not at all. I'm going further upstream, don't mean to pester these salmon with the glittering tinsel and flummery of flies.

Near the headwaters, a narrow concrete bridge marks the end of the legally fishable water. Fishermen call these last or first few miles the 'holy water': it is proper that sanctuary should lie above them. Beyond this is timber company land covered by saplings of recently planted firs, meagre in the vanished shadows of their elders. The river is thin here, its bones showing: the rocks of the bed poke out of narrow green coils of water, lie under impassive sheets of reflected sky. Somewhere invisibly below, the fish up from the sea are awake and patient in their element, waiting for what the water will tell them, to know the next thing. After several years of drought, they wait for the same thing as last year - rain to swell the flow and spike the currents with dissolved oxygen. These are steelhead, anadromous rainbow trout, called 'steel' for the blue and grey of their heads, and for their entirely surprising strength when caught. What does a steelhead know of foundries ? Beaten and burnished by the multitudinous perils of stream, river, ocean and back again, it is now as simple as a knife blade, driven by a single quick purpose. Finding them requires reading the river, like a script in an unknown language, or even more simply mysterious: like any writing to the illiterate: deciphering the meanings of leaves that pause in the current, a curl of water on the surface from a boulder five feet down: things for which an instinct would need no elucidation, though dry observation needs a slow long chain of reasons.

A fifty yard run of white water, thigh deep, turns at a spit of small round stones, then runs into a narrow channel divided by a single sharp edged rock, before settling into the pool below. Auden wrote, when touring Iceland, "Too many stones, and all of them the wrong size". These stones, on the other side, are all quite right: slightly smaller than an apple, with a cool mossy presence and a comfortable heft in the hand. In the pool, the currents are thick smooth ropes of water, braided into the misty depths. If the river were running strong, there would be fish at the tail, resting in quiet water after fighting the current of the outflow. As it is, the probabilities are for the channel or near the powerful current at the head. There is shelter both behind a rock and in front, but steelhead often prefer to rest in the cushion of water piled up ahead of the stone. Trying to remember all this, I wade into the brisk turbulence to begin.

After twenty minutes, every imagined lie in the channel has been shown the fly. Carefully, attentively, I have watched the tip of the line as it drifts, imagining the lure's progress as it lifts and swirls over the bottom. From diving in rivers, I know the cool gloom down there, under a bright and dancing sky: holding in a break of the current, seeing the drift of small particles of detritus blowing by, like travelling fast in one place. In all this, the fly is startling and egregious, tinsel ribs glowing over the black body under a white wing, red tail barely red, closer to purple in the deeply filtered light. Losing faith in this channel, so also I lose concentration, considering the broken surfaces of the water instead of its deeps. Further down, the river bends off a rock wall some twenty feet wide, extending fifteen feet above. To reach down that wall will take a cast thrown well upstream, allowing the fly to sink throughout a long drift. Planning these casts, but reflexively fishing the fly around the rock that splits the current, the awaited event is unexpected. As I write now, clattering on a keyboard in a cube of plasterboard in a cube of concrete, I still see her head break into the sun, watch as she allows the current to wash her from her lie downstream.

Tightening on the fish brings a fierce reaction. A swift run to the tail of the pool ends in the shallows with a jump that's nearly a headstand, the whole length of the fish arcing around to splash heavily down. After ten minutes, the fish hangs deep, braced under the main flow: far off, the rose and silver of her side gleams up through obscure complex patterns of water. The fish is too heavy and the current too strong to bring her up to the head where I stand. Attempting to cross here would mean a swim, but the rock wall blocks any other passage. A few cracks and ledges in it allow me to convince myself that climbing over is possible. Before starting, I watch the fish for several minutes, memorizing the details - a slight hiss where the line cuts the stream, weaving under the pressure, a thin film of water sliding up then collapsing in a smooth curve; a weight electric and dense held now in hand; glimpses of dusty rose in the misty green, through shafts of light let into the river. This is undeniable. Halfway over the climb, I lose a foothold, then the crack in which my fingers are cramped.

The fall breaks the reel from the rod, dropping me on a ledge some four feet deep. Rod in one hand, reel in the other, leaning hard into the rock and gripping with my elbows as the water pulls at my clothes, I traverse the ledge hoping that it won't end. An undeserved happiness - when I take up the slack the fish is still fast. From here it's easy, complicated only by having to manage the line without a reel. In the end the fish comes back to me, the powerful beats of her tail establishing a slow and waning time. I grasp her wrist between the tail and the body, keeping a taut line to hold the head up, and walk ashore.

Afterwards I contemplate the torn jagged metal of rod and reel. There is duration, since the wind is in the leaves and sunshine dazzles off the water, which speaks in its sweetly running voice. In the late afternoon I try to fish further, rolling curves of line out across the stream, but can't make it other than mechanical. Below the surface is a pure wildness. On this side, the quotidian - a wisp of foul odor from the paper mill, cars passing on the road above, a headache from dehydration, the edge of a worry about my wife in the city. From the timber farms through the valley of second homes, down under the interstate, this compromised river. In it lives the ideal, but how would the ideal know that? It is the 'ding an sich', the thing in itself. The ideal lives in my head, from where it is a long way back to the real.

Living at all times with illusions and regrets from the past, assailed by fears and dangerous optimisms for the future; trying to be merely in the stream, feeling the wash of its currents over my back. Why so simple a thing as catching a fish and experiencing its terror should place me so solidly, centrally, in being alive, I don't know. I am saddened that I need so much violence to live.

Brahms Rhapsody #2. ish.

one picture

Giovanni dice:

What if you were forced – due to a material constraint that is pretty well unthinkable – to pare down your personal visual archive to a single picture? Which one would you choose? How would you operate that selection? What would that picture come to mean to you, and could you bear to let go of the others?
.. To have a single portrait of oneself means to have one more than almost all of the people in almost all of history.

John Scalzi in 2020 thinks about the sacred mundane, 

We may take exponentially more photos than we did in the decades past, but even so, it may still turn out that in the end we have just a few photos that will stand in for entire years or eras in our lives, with the rest lost — like photos in other eras — to time and rot and benign neglect. Photos are often mundane things in the moment but when you come across them later as the sole image from an entire time in your life, they can take on an almost sacred feel, the one small path back to a different time and place.

Stanisław Lem, 

 I remember the gate, stairs, doors, hallways, and rooms of the house on Brajerowska Street where I was born, and many people, such as the neighbors mentioned, but without faces, because those faces changed, and my memory, ignorant of the inevitability of such change, was helpless, as a photographic plate is helpless with a moving object. Yes, I can visualize my father, but I can see his figure and clothes more clearly than his features, because images from many years are superimposed and I do not know how I want to see him, the man turned completely gray or the still vigorous fifty-year-old. And it is the same with everyone I knew for a long enough time. When the photographs and portraits are lost, our complete defenselessness against time becomes apparent.

I have many pictures of myself, entities multiplied beyond necessity, but none of them looks like me. Instead here is a truly single picture, my great-great-grandfather with his Crimean war medals. One of them survives and is hung at the bottom of the frame. Sergeant-Major James Kerr:

When that picture was taken, neither Denver nor Colorado existed, only the windy plains cut by the broad muddy river whose name is 'flat water' in most languages - Kíckatus in Pawnee, Nebraskier in Ota, Plate in French. The Arapahoe called it the Tallow River, niinénii niicíihéhe'. Tallow is a word Sgt. Kerr would likely have known, meaning the rendered fat of cattle, but I doubt the Arapahoe meant this: instead my guess is it meant something like the promised land, the fat land: plenty of buffalo to keep the tribe in a happy well-fed state of grease. Now the tribes and the buffalo are gone, and a singular picture hangs in the Denver suburbs at the end of its travels. My connection to it is through my mother and her stories, tenuous but real. My children have only stories of stories of another country and the past.

I have exhausted my knowledge of him, that martial presence standing lonely but assured in the empty palace of memory. His daughter by his first wife was Sarah McDonald Kerr, who taught at the Sabbath School of the Presbyterian kirk in town.

When her mother died and SM Kerr remarried, Sarah went to South Africa as a governess, taking with her a picture of her father and that Bible. The governed family was the Stevensons, who lived through the siege of Ladysmith, and had a street in town named for the father. There she met another vagrant Scot, Leslie Singer, a master stonemason and builder: who built the bridges on the old Delagoa Bay line; knew Percy Fitzpatrick and many of the hunters from the earlies; put up the stone lions couchant on Oom Paul Kruger's stoep.

They lived in Pilgrim's Rest to escape the fevers and morbidities of the coast. In the second Boer war he retreated to Durban, the family going back to Scotland. I hope SM Kerr met his grandchildren there. Meanwhile across in the Free State, another ancestor was fighting for the Boers; his family and small children swept up into the first civilian concentration camps of history, as Lord Roberts pursued a scorched earth campaign against the guerrillas.

The hatred of the English nurtured in these camps lasted well, so I met it when conscripted into the armies of apartheid in the next decade of the 80s. The Afrikaners were derogated as rock spiders, a term going back to that war: the Boers would not line up to be slaughtered with due process by the imperial soldiers, sensibly preferring to hide in the rocks and snipe from there. They called us rooinekke or blerrie rooinekke, red necks, from the sunburnt necks of those imperial troops. Wars last in strange ways. There was another term, soutpiel, meaning a salty organ of procreation: the idea being the Englishman had one foot in South Africa, another in England, and said organ in between washed by the salt oceans. This startled me with an unexpected note of fantasy. Before the Army I had not thought to hate the English for imprisoning my Dutch and Danish forebears. After that, it still seemed a bootless emotion.

Sarah's daughter Ellen married Gerard Bier, a descendant of several gloriously-named Hieronymus Biers. The house of the first of these still stands on a canal in Amsterdam. The second was a Boer, though his daughters preferred English. Ellen and Gerard lived in what had been Delagoa Bay, then Lourenço Marques, Gerard working as an accountant. His inkwell is another remainder, escaped alone from the erosions of time running down. Here it is on my desk, sharing the space with a computer monitor and these words on it. The inkwell stands as a memento mori, a reminder of other scriveners, and a blaze of silver light.

For some time they shared a house with the Anglican Bishop of Lebombo. Since it was the Bishop's residence, it became a Palace, though just the same wood and iron shanty as the other houses in town. My mother was born in the Miramar Hotel, as they felt the bachelor Bishop should not be embarrassed by these female proceedings.  

My mother remembered both of her grandparents fondly. Sarah was an intelligent kindly woman, though tolerating no kinds of fun on the Sabbath - Kirk followed by some light Bible perusal while clad in Sunday best, was about the sum of it. They had retired to Pilgrim's Rest by this time. The grandchildren found respite there from the jiggers, mambas and heat of LM during the summers. I have another picture now lost to everything but memory, of two little girls in bathing suits by the Blyde river. In the end Joy lived in the same retirement home as my mother. We went to lunch when she was in her 80s and my mother no longer grew older. Joy's stories of those days took the scenic route, up down and around through recollections of hills, forests, rivers, children and parents: yet invariably reached their destination in good order, winding up all the threads and gathering them back together. I was too young and simpleminded to understand this prodigious feat of memory, a lost world and its peoples held up and turned to the light for me: and thought Joy was wandering, though only one of us was astray.

Leslie and Sarah are buried together in Pilgrim's, in the new graveyard. Their little grandson who survived only a few days lies beside them. My mother wanted to be buried there as well, but by that time it had become a national monument with no new thing permitted, no longer that possibility we were. 

In the Ukraine where war is starting yet again, the child of her fathers and mothers looks at their one picture, and speaks for us from the museum of abandoned secrets:
"I don't have it in me to resist the numbing spread of this insane, universal tenderness that pools under my skin like blood from a thousand wounds - this visceral, glandular pity for these dead, for their youth, their speech, their laughter no longer audible from where we are, their piercingly pitiful, childlike innocence to the impenetrable gloom that awaits them."