A River Kind of Mood
This is a good time of year on the Hay River, in Canada’s Northwest Territories. The fall colors. The spruce and wild cranberry. The smell of wood burning stoves. The nights are getting a little colder, with hints of the northern lights. The view out my window seems temporal. Nothing stays the same from one day to the next as we approach the deep dive into winter.
But these days, I’m taking care to better notice the river itself. I live in a small community of 20 or so houses nestled into a tight bend in the Hay River — the river surrounds our one-road neighborhood on three sides. For me, the autumnal colors and grayer skies have accentuated the river’s texture: the foam collecting on logjams, and the muskeg-fed waters the color of black tea.
When I fall into these “river moods” (which I often do), I like to reread the opening pages of a longtime favorite, John Graves’s Goodbye to a River. The book is both an adventure story and an elegy. In 1957, Graves and his “passenger” — a six-month-old dachshund — canoed a stretch of Central Texas’s Brazos River that was soon to be inundated by the De Cordova Bend Dam. Really, Graves’s book is about our connection to place, however small and personal that place may be. “You can comprehend a piece of a river,” he writes.
But that “piece of river” is undoubtedly connected to a whole. Graves continues: “A whole river is mountain country and hill country and flat country and swamp and delta country, is rock bottom and sand bottom and weed bottom and mud bottom, is blue, green, red, clear, brown, wide, narrow, fast, slow, clean, and filthy water, is all kinds of trees and grasses and all the breeds of animals and birds and men that pertain and have ever pertained to its changing shores.”
I know, according to maps, where the waters of the Hay River come from — the labyrinth of peatlands just south of here — and where they go — the Arctic Ocean, eventually, via a series of lakes and deltas. It’s a complex place, the boreal forest and the wetlands of the North, greater than the sum of its parts. But for now, I can only take notice, and learn to comprehend, this place: this particular piece of river.
Austin Price
Contributing Editor, Earth Island Journal
P.S. We’d love to hear about a “piece of river” special to you. Drop us a note at [email protected] to tell us about it.
Photo by: Oliver Letellier
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