The River Finds its Way

These days in my old home town you will find us gathered by the river.

We were used to the river as it always was: pooled in stagnant mire behind a sheer cascade over a concrete dam.

For many of us, this was the river, and these watery cliffs, where the water shrieked in perpetual cascades over concrete cliffs, were the falls.

But suddenly everything is different: the Poisodon barge has done its work. The concrete enclosures breached, the river newly dances. 

Briskly.

Twisted.

Loud.

The river finds its way.

Beneath where it once pooled, you see the muck and the flotsam, and every so often a persistent murky pool marooned on high ground. Up in the trees, you see water-borne debris from where the river crested, its highest level ever, a few months ago before the dam came down.

The river seems newly sparkly, and urgent, as it twists about in its old bed, finding its course.

It's alive and it's loud. It is tentative, and yet it sups a new-found freedom.

Finding a new course, which is its old course. 

Boulders revealed, along with rusted steel drums and concrete block and bricks and sycamore roots.

Somewhere down river, past the Prospect Street bridge, after the river bends, and still under water, are the ferny grottoes and the mysterious boulders, and the geological wonders that generations ago brought legions on steam trains, and just beyond that, the stairstep Great Falls the natives called Coppacaw. Our forebears chose to bury those cascades under a reservoir, behind a dam built to pull trolley cars by traction along red brick streets.

But for now it is enough that this one little dam has come down, and like the river itself, we seem tentative and unsure, somewhat like orphan ducklings bottle-fed in a backyard wading pool, and then let loose in free flowing water for the very first time.

Kids who fished off the old wooden boardwalk, in the deep murky pools, find that they can now wade in to the rapids, and cast their lines in the current.

We are not used to how LOUD the river is as it twists and falls, and it almost, at certain points, drowns out the constant blur of traffic, on the state highway whose concrete pilings pierce our twisted river's sandstone gorge.

We get used to things. 

And then notice, suddenly, when they change.

Something as simple and as subtle as the sound of water, and the rate at which it flows.

It was always one way, and then suddenly, it is different.

That is why you will find us, in my old hometown, on these clear August days that feel like May, down by they river.

We are twitchy and expectant, wondering what is just beyond the bend, and marveling at the tenacity of this river, which in spite of us, and the concrete we pour, finds its way.

Briskly.

Loudly.

Singing over sandstone, unleashed.