Viewed from the sky, rivers are among the last nongeometric features of the landscape. Roads diagram the land with lines and right angles, towns and cities are arranged in squares and rectangles, farmers' fields are laid out in patterns of inadvertent artistry.
Only rivers appear inviolable. They travel without plan, twisting like tendrils, as indirect as idle thoughts. Bordered by corridors of green, they seem immune from encroachment--until you look closer and see a length of river that has been "channelized" for the convenience of barges, its bends ironed out like wrinkles. Then you see the sudden widening of a reservoir, the broad end blunted by the abrupt slash of a concrete dam, and all arguments of utility lose their force. A river dammed or straightened is a travesty, a violation, an outrage. If you want to see people enraged, strangle the rivers they love.
Our love of rivers runs deep. Poets, painters, and composers have expressed it for thousands of years, for reasons most of us understand instinctively. While every star and snowflake and towheaded child is winding down to stillness, rivers win our hearts for seeming to defy universal laws. We are stirred by the perpetual flow of current, the effortless partnership with gravity, the easily observed truth that you can never, as Heraclitus said, step into the same river twice. Like us, rivers spring from obscure sources and flow toward unavoidable destinations. If the sea represents eternity, the rivers that flow into it are the twisting, bold, and unstoppable currents of time.
Rivers give the illusion of progress, an inevitable and easily charted progression from origin to ending. From sufficient height and perspective we can see otherwise--a river that from the bank seems defined and permanent is actually temporary and easily directed. Even the water itself does not go anywhere, not in any final sense. That unstable liquid flows and tumbles down a river, mingles with the sea, disintegrates into component molecules that rise skyward, cement with others, condense, drift with the wind, accumulate on flecks of salt and dust, fall, seep into the earth, and enter into conspiracies to form rivulets, then creeks, then rivers again.
Rivers, we must remember, are segments of a larger cycle, but they are among the most visible and appealing of those segments, more accessible than ground water, more dependable than rain, more easily fathomed than oceans or lakes. Water is at its best when winding downhill between banks.
Our language makers must have lived near rivers. We think in streams of consciousness and speak in sweeping channels of utterance. If we speak well we are told we are "fluent," and no one is surprised to learn that the word is derived from the Latin "to flow" and shares roots with "fluid" and "flux" and "effluence."
Listen carefully to flowing water and you can hear babbling, murmuring, and whispering sounds so like human voices that you wonder if rivers were the primal model for the sounds we make. In writing we shape our thoughts into sentences and string them together until they look like a river meandering across a plain. The words line back and forth down the page, slowing at commas, eddying between parentheses (a brief loitering, a small backwater of meaning), gathering force and momentum until they spill off the bottom of the page like water falling off a continent into an ocean.
In an Inuit legend all rivers once flowed both uphill and down, but Raven, the creator of the world, decided that such a convenient arrangement made life too easy for people. We have been riding the current or fighting it ever since.
Those who ride it are river people. River people know that current can be resisted but never defeated. They abandon themselves to flow and flux, accept the value of boundaries and the power of persistent current, understand that loved ones, accomplishments, opinions, possessions, and all the carefully fashioned handiwork of a lifetime fall eventually to the surface and are carried away downstream. If you are a river person you can never cross a bridge without looking for a glimpse of water. You remember your first river trip in a canoe and the intoxicating sensation that you were getting something for nothing, that you were stealing a free ride, a gratis trip on the merry-go-round. You remember the dizzying conviction that you and the river were stationary, while the land unreeled beside you in a continuous play of background and perspective.
Rivers have a way of enchanting us, of somehow prying into a nebulous pleasure center in our souls. I think it is a matter, largely, of earning the right to be enchanted. We care most deeply about rivers when we have invested a great deal of effort in working on them or have spent much time canoeing, fishing, exploring, or observing them. As in any love affair, you get back only as much as you put in. It's a tribute to the value we place on moving water that so many people are willing to put so much into the affair.
(Excerpted from The Bird in the Waterfall: A Natural History of Oceans, Rivers, and Lakes, by Jerry Dennis. Used by permission of the author and HarperCollins Publishers.)