Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Upstream

The river above here is largely unknown, the climb is difficult and the road passes near enough to provide a view, satisfying most. The river has been explored by government mappers up to the headwaters, looking for mineral deposits and to complete maps, but it remains unknown nevertheless. The illusion has been sustained, if one asks around or consults a topographical map, that it is well-known, but I know this to be false. For example, at the headwaters itself, further up than is shown, there are herons. At night they weep, a inconsolable grief, and it is from these tears the river is formed.

Further downstream from here, the murmurs of fish enter, and the water feels like cold steel, impenetrable like certain shades of deep blue, the sound of a crack working it's way through a china plate. It is from this, the imagined but uncared for, that the river takes form, visible water, of measurable dimension.

In recent years I have spent considerable time upstream, along what I believe to be an unknown section of the river. I have meant to examine things closely there, and sometimes I think I have the answer and gone gleefully ahead, only to haul myself back to an ordered course. In this way I saw a house one day, perched at the start of the forested hill above the river.

It was painted gray, with blue cape cod style shutters. A broad porch, shadowed by the limbs of a cottonwood. A white porcelain doorknob opened the French door. The floors were oak parquet, the rooms spacious with hemp rugs. The walls were papered with Cockerell marbled paper, from England, the colors somewhere between primary and pastel, like the taste of a peach bursting on your tongue.

One fall I entered a room for the first time, and saw a book sitting on a windowsill, open and face down. A single chair was next to the window, as though the occupant had just left to brew tea. I sat down and read the book, a language I didn't know, in hopes of understanding.

There was a woman's bed, with a brass bedstead and a chenille spread, somehow light was always falling on it. We would lay there, trusting, and fall asleep in the afternoon.

We would dance, the only sound of our bare feet on the wood floor. An imagined music filling the room without echoes, strands of her hair stuck to my cheek, the sound of our breathing.

In that time I do not remember ever being away from the river, though I know I was. Even now in the memory of it I do not know where I am. I know I still spend time in the upper part of the river and that relationship I know to be true.

Still further up the river are the unfolding of other relationships, together with the loss of the promise of anything to be found. I have been told that this is the reason no one goes up that far, though the promise, in it's way, is kept.

It is the walk home that is terrifying.

20 comments:

  1. WOW!

    (Can't find any other words to express the effect this has on me, Mike.)

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    1. It just sort of came out of my brain on a direct route to my fingers, Martha.

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    2. This showed up in my email - made me think of you.

      http://riverlust.tumblr.com/post/71446706551/waking-at-night-the-blue-river-is-gray-at-morning

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  2. If you weren't a man of responsibility, who would you be?

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    1. A question for sure, Joanne. I really don't know.

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  3. The Crow said it best: WOW!

    An impressive piece of writing, Mike.

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  4. I just read this to my wife and she, too, said WOW. She says you should send it to the New Yorker because it's the type of "think" piece they are wont to publish.

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    1. I'm not sure what to say about this...it just came out and this is what was there on 'paper'. It's an amalgam of things, dreams, memories, whatever. I really can't explain it.

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  5. This was magnificent. The bit about maps got me thinking of a line Joe Kane used in his story of kayaking the Amazon;

    "[M]aps are such seductive fictions..."

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    1. Maps are, aren't they? In the early 60's I looked at maps of the Yukon and Alaska, hearing Robert Service's works.

      Cary, my wife, drove me nuts......when on road trips to area's not seen, she'd be over there sitting shotgun, her nose buried in a map....I'd say something sarcastic, she'd say "Do you know that mountain off there is called________". I'd shut up.

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  6. A superb bit of writing. Sir, my hat is off to you.

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    1. From a writer like you, that's a compliment indeed.

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  7. Yes, you have an economically sweet way of writing

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    1. Thanks John. I like your posts, even if I don't reply. I don't have much to say about cats, particularly.
      Cheers
      Mike

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    1. I had to look that one up, I seem to remember a colleague using it in the UK.

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    1. Thanks. BTW, my crocus are almost ready to pop open and daffodils are above ground.

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  10. Hi Mike. I 'found' you over at John Gray's post today.

    I thank you for 'taking me up river' today....I so needed this little trip.
    Reality can be difficult at times.

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  11. Exciting indeed. My "home river" for flyfishing is so familiar to me after all these years I hardly explore new streams anymore and haven't bee fishing in Montana in more than ten. Still there is comfort in familiarity and I do know all the good pools and runs so the fishing is almost always good...:)

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