Whirl

As a teenager, my brother Tony and I would often float the southern end of the Cossatot river in southwestern Arkansas. We’d put in at a public landing and use our little 10 horse Evinrude to carry us up the river a few miles, then we’d shut it off and float down stream. Talking occasionally, but for the most part just listening to the world around us and casting our lines into the gentle current.

My brother is gone now. These are the memories of him I treasure the most—it was here, on the river, that I knew him best.

Floating on a river imposes a different pace on your life. It can take all day to cover a distance you could drive in an hour. On a river, you have time to study the world around you. As you meander across the countryside, you start to develop an appreciation for the landscape. You begin to take on a new awareness. You are alerted to changes in current, to the color of the water, and to the diversity of the wildlife along the way.

If you drive cross country, one of the first things you notice is the utter blandness of our man made geography. Each town appears the same from the interstate, a never ending repetition of franchise signs and overpasses. But on a river, the natural landscape often supersedes the will of man. There are no billboards—few signs of any type. You have the opportunity to see the countryside as closely as possible to the way early pioneers may have seen it.

That is, in the few places we haven’t screwed it up. The river system is a guage of our environment. When Lewis and Clark floated the Ohio river in 1803; they observed places which they literally had to push their boat through herds of animals crossing the great river. In his book “River Horse“, William Least Heat-Moon made a similar observation whilst retracing their journey on the same river. Only this time he and is traveling companion were floating their way through a vast assortment of garbage: from tampon applicators to cigarette butts. 

Rivers are now our ashtrays. The next time you hear a smoker say that cigarette filters are bio-degradable, please challenge him–those things last for years. A butt, casually tossed out a car window on I-71 may someday reach the Gulf of Mexico.

Our arrogance extends far beyond garbage. Over the last two centuries, we have dammed, straightened, and levied our waterways beyond recognition. Each levee robs the land of nutrients and actually increases the severity of flooding for communities downstream.The reshaping of a river also robs it of one of its most crucial elements—the meander. This gentle zigzag across the countryside may not strike us as orderly or efficient. But it is a natural pattern that filters the water and shapes our geography.

A river that cannot twist and turn has lost its personality—It has become a canal, a ditch. Once that happens, travel on the river losses its greatest appeal—the curiosity of what’s around the bend.

I don’t think these things necessarily rose to the height of my consciousness when I was a young teenager. I was just soaking my feet and trying to catch a fish. But our experiences on that river gave me an appreciation for what we are losing.

But the story is not purely a tale of loss. Some 7 years after I left home, my father, daughter, and I revisited the Cossatot. We were motoring upstream towards the mouth of the river and as we rounded a huge bend our eyes were drawn to the top of a tall oak. There, in the highest branch, was a bald eagle—the first I’d ever seen in the wild.

I took that eagle as a sign of hope. Hope that we can restore our environment to a better state. Hope that my children and grand children can also float on a clear river, and hope they will feel the same burning question that still drives me forward today:

What wonder lies just around the bend?

© 2008 by Rodney Gleghorn, all rights reserved.