Sustenance, Transport & Power

Water is essential. Water is finite. Water has no substitute. Humans settled by rivers of fresh flowing water. Rivers offer sustenance, transport, and power.

Children of a culture born in a water-rich environment, we have never really learned how important water is to us. We understand it, but we do not respect it.
— William Ashworth

Wright Dam, Fergus Falls

To experience a river flowing through a small town or a city is to witness human nature, who we are, and what we value.

Any river is really the summation of the whole valley. To think of it as nothing but water is to ignore the greater part.
— Hal Borland

Otter Tail River, Fergus Falls

Uninhibited population growth and non-reflective consumptive patterns and behaviors spawns water contamination and ecosystem impairment.

Mississippi River above Lock and Dam No. 1

Contamination of rivers results from a confluence of human-induced processes and patterns that call for a systems thinking approach to avert and remediate. Systems thinking is a central concept of watershed management that seeks to limit further degradation and avoid causing unintended consequences.

In a mucked up lovely river,
I cast my little fly.
I look at that river and smell it
and it makes me wanna cry.
Oh to clean our dirty planet,
now there's a noble wish,
and I'm puttin my shoulder to the wheel
'cause I wanna catch some fish.

Greg Brown, from Spring Wind in Dream Cafe

REFERENCES

• Nor Any Drop to Drink, William Ashworth, 1982.
• Systems Thinking, Wikipedia
• Spring Wind, lyrics by Greg Brown.
• This Hill, This Valley, Hal Borland, May 1, 1990.
• Watershed Management, Timothy Randhir, March 2011

Water Meditation

Civilization is recent and fleeting. Nature ― as far as we know ― is eternal. Water is fluid, clear, and shapeless.

Emerson used flowing water imagery and metaphors for water in his essays and poems. In the essay Nature, published in 1836, Emerson asks,

Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour and is not reminded of the flux of all things?

Water represents fluidity, transcendence, and spiritual insight. Water reminds us of the fickle and fleeting nature of how we perceive time.

Emerson encouraged independent thinking and imagination over convention. He reveled in the spiritual nature of natural phenomena.

Hyalite Creek

Appreciation for natural phenomena like the force of flowing water, the mechanics of an avalanche, the phases of the moon, or the life cycle of a mayfly invariably leads us to the vast infinity of poetry. 

Water
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The water understands
Civilization well;
It wets my foot, but prettily,
It chills my life, but wittily,
It is not disconcerted,
It is not broken-hearted:
Well used, it decketh joy,
Adorneth, doubleth joy:
Ill used, it will destroy,
In perfect time and measure
With a face of golden pleasure
Elegantly destroy.

REFERENCES

• Nature, an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1836), Wikipedia.

The River is Ice

Flowing water is a multipurpose literary metaphor. The course of life is like a river — what we need we carry along and what we don't need, or can't carry, settles out.

In Ask Me, William Stafford considers a future time when the river is ice when he might answer questions reconciling his life.

Ask Me

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

— William Stafford

Stafford writes of the silent river and reflects upon its stillness, yet he acknowledges its undercurrents.

Frozen rivers, lakes, and ponds make us aware of the seasonal passage of time, the prospect of the suspension of time, and of objects temporarily frozen in time. Objects seemingly frozen in time, like sticks and leaves frozen in ice, invite inspection.

John Haines compares the alder leaves and gleaming pebbles frozen in ice to a night sky with its fixed planets and stars.

"I bend over, looking at the debris caught there in the clear, black depth of the ice: I see a few small sticks, and many leaves. There are alder leaves, roughly toothed and still half green; the more delicate birch leaves and aspen leaves, the big, smooth poplar leaves, and narrow leaves from the willows. They are massed or scattered, as they fell quietly or as the wind blew them into the freezing water. Some of them are still fresh in color, glowing yellow and orange; others are mottled with grey and brown. A few older leaves lie sunken and black on the silty bottom. Here and there a pebble of quartz is gleaming. But nothing moves there. It is a still, cold world, something like night, with its own fixed planets and stars."
— John Haines

Frozen leaves and planets and stars in the night sky create an illusion of the fixed and unchanging.

REFERENCES

• The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Twenty-Five Years in the Alaska Wilderness by John Meade Haines. 2000, Graywolf Press.
• William Stafford Archives.