I walk down, down, down to the river most nights. Sometimes from up above the canyon, I think “I don’t have time or energy for the river tonight” and it is those days I need to go to the river the most.
The river is called Devil Track, but its original Ojibwe name is Manidoo-bimaadagaakowinii-ziibi (Spirits Going Along on the Ice River), which was recently added to the road signs marking the river where it passes under Highway 61. My portion of this river is hardly accessible. It has no public hiking trails or paddle-able rapids and the trees grow close and thick around it.
To get there, I take a network of trails down into the canyon. There are rotting wooden steps and mud and voracious bugs that make pausing to take in the scene in midsummer to be unpleasant. The return trip is the hard part, turning my back on the river to begin the climb. The first few return climbs of the season are wheezed with the weight of winter’s slowness, legs and lungs burning. By autumn I can climb it without pausing, but it never feels easy.
Because it is hard to access, it feels incumbent upon me to bear witness to the river. How it swells brown after a heavy rainfall or early in the spring. How it pools and slows in the late summer, inviting me to shed my shoes and walk barefoot down the middle where the rocks are smooth and uninterrupted. How it hums all day and all night, the undercurrent of my days where I live up at the top of the canyon.
I have lived by a lake before, but this is my first experience living by a river. I find it unsettling in a paradoxical way that tells me I will always, from here on out, need to live by a river.
Scott Russell Sanders writes, "Riverness—the appeal of a river, the way it speaks to us—has to do with our craving for a sense of direction within the seeming randomness of the world."
The river is a thing, but not a thing. You can own land that a river cuts through, but if the river is the water itself, it is always coming and going. It is here and not here at all. It cannot be owned.
I know the river doesn’t need a witness, but I need the ritual of witnessing it. The river is just a river, but it has also become a mirror. I imagine I know who the river wants me to be. I promise it that I will relearn how to be present and look at my phone less and start editing my book and stop being so damn afraid all the time. I’ve cried into this river and cooled my arthritic hands in the rapids and floated my tired body in the shallow pool.
When I go there, I think about how I have changed since the last time I was there, maybe just a day ago, maybe a week. I think about how I am seeing or touching the river as it never has been before and never will be again.
How today I am the age I never have been before, and never will be again.
Some days this thought feels heavy, but others it feels hopeful. The river, indifferent, just flows.
Thank you for reading What Is Woven In. As summer is upon us, I will be sending out emails every other week instead of every week to allow for the seasonal uptick in busyness in my other businesses.
For further reading about the original names for the rivers of the North Shore of Lake Superior, visit https://ojibwe.net/rivers-of-the-north-shore/.
This is how I feel about the prairie. Thanks, Emily.
So beautiful! This makes me miss living near a river. I grew up near one and it was quite a formative part of my childhood. I don't know why they have such a magnetic effect on the human soul but they really, really do.