Five April, Twenty Twenty-One
Rivers I have known
The air has changed. I can smell it. However, the winter-weary trees with their tangles of branches just beginning to show the first buds still give the impression of gothic doom and death. It’s all theater. Deep inside those gnarled trunks, under the protective armor of bark, water is coursing up into the tips of the smallest twigs and sap has begun to loosen and flow.
And defying the dying light, there’s the mighty Hudson River glowing with a steely sheen.
I was so surprised to arrive at the banks of the Thames in London and find it to be, well, a creek really (pronounced “krik”). Our guide told us that in the summer when the tide is out, there are places where one can walk across the Thames and the water only comes chest-high.
I’m sorry, that’s not a river. That’s a krik.
The Hudson, now that’s a river, even if it is only 315 miles long.
What the Hudson lacks in length it more than makes up for in width and history. Henry Hudson’s Half Moon sailed up the river in 1609 and there went the neighborhood.
Before claiming the Hudson as my own, it’s a tradition you know?, my river was the Cuyahoga River that cuts Cleveland, Ohio into two cities. That was the crooked river that made ships’ pilots drink and that the city used as a giant toilet until it had burned one too many times (13 to be exact) and people decided enough was enough. Now people are aghast. The river burned? All the rivers that had the bad luck to have cities grow next to them did until it dawned on someone that maybe that could be a health hazard.
Now the only time the Cuyahoga River is a health hazard is about once every summer when some drunken frat boy decides he can’t wait for the water taxi and thinks he can swim from one side of the Flats to the other. He’s usually wrong.
I called the Thames a creek because I know about creeks (pronounced “kriks”). The eastern fork of the Black River, a tributary of the…
