You run til the river feels primordial

October in my hometown smells like bread baking and leaves burning. It sounds like train whistles and the last, desperate chirping of crickets.

You set out on a run, not really feeling it. You phone it in.

But, with each step, something:

Kids down on Front Street, painting Halloween scenes on storefront windows, with poster paints.

Burnouts smoking under the bridge.

The bells at St. Joe's clanging an unfamiliar hymn.

Tiny locust leaves raining down on gray sandstone.

Mule-eared whitetail deer staring you down from the center of the Gorge trail, then scattering up steep slopes, at the last possible moment.

The river bends. The sun sets, blazing the river banks gold and orange.

An October evening, and all is as it should be in my old home town.

This run did what is was supposed to do. It clears my mind. It focuses me on the place where I now reside: the place where the river bends. My old hometown. The great Falls of the Cuyahoga. Its sandstone cliffs. Its waterfalls. Its springs that gurgle from mossy quartz-flecked ledges.

Why is it that this quotidian place, which for forty years, I could take or leave, now seems so urgent?

Every day that I don't get out to these cliffs seems a tragic waste. Every day that I don't dip my toes in her oleaginous waters, I feel remiss.

Virginia Creeper

 So, you run. Past the old coal-burning power plant, that rained soot down over Seventh Street in your formative years. Past the old ice rink, built by the CCC. Past the big dam, which you hope you live long enough to see blown up.

Somewhere just past Mary Campbell's Cave, but before the arching grace of the High Level Bridge--that place where the desperate plunge and brandy bottles rain down--you reach it: you've run til the river feels primordial.

Crimson Dogwood

 You've run till the drone of Route 8 disappears, absorbed by beech trees, clinging to Sharon Conglomerate, with fierce determination.

You've run til the train whistles, and the smell of bread baking, no longer waft through sandstone canyons.

You've run til you arrive at that promontory sandstone boulder, that juts out over the river, in a grove of hemlock trees.

You've reached it: the place where the river bends. The place where atop the ledge Native Americans built their Big Cuyahoga town, above the great falls.

You watch the water dance, crisply, over river-smoothed sandstone rocks. It seems timeless, this river, and yet its changing route is etched in these very canyon walls. But this spot, this hemock grove, I imagine a denizen of Big Cuyahoga town might recognize yet today.

You marvel at the circuitous route you have taken, to reach this spot, a stone's throw from where you were born, in Sister Ignatia's hospital, up on the Gorge above the Little Cuyahoga's valley.

Golden leaves illumine my woodland path: sinewy silver trunked beech trees, sugar maples, and mitten-leafed sassafras all turned this week, lighting my way. Moss glows an impossibly vibrant green on puddingstone cavern walls after a wet, wet summer. Fungi of startling shapes sprout on the forbidden upper trail.

Golden sassafras leaves alight a woodland trail

These moss covered canyon walls. These lucky rock mountains. These beech trees, clinging for all they are worth, to craggy boulders, until they eventually succumb, and reveal a hollow core, that belies their tenacious grasping toward the sun.

I'm a body in constant motion. But, upon reaching this certain promontory rock, I sit. I listen. To the water. To the moon. To October. You reach a point: where this time, this place, this river, this moon, are everything. And enough. This wet magical summer, where one rainbow after another spanned the crooked river, where every day I forced myself out to the river, it yielded impossible riches.