Headwaters – Terrain.org

In some ways the river was a first love, a place of birth. A place to begin again.

 
All stories have beginnings. Rivers do too. The beginnings of this river are hard to trace, though the main stem of the Delaware starts here in Hancock, New York, where the East and West Branches unite. But before those, there are creeks, and springs, and tiny rivulets. Some snowmelt from the Catskill and Pocono Mountains, runoff from farms, the rain falling off the tin roof of an old barn, sliding off pitched eaves—it all ends up here, in this river.

Where it provides drinking water for some 15 million people, including the residents of New York City and Philadelphia, and is the longest undammed river in the East. I begin at mile 330 and have 200 miles between me and Trenton, where the river turns tidal, estuarial. Where I to navigate those currents, and dodge transport ships, another 130 miles would get me to Cape May and the Delaware Bay.

In 1609 Henry Hudson sailed the Halve Maen (half-moon) into the bay and what he called the South River, claiming it for Holland and the Dutch East India Company. Dutch settler Adriaen van der Donck would write in midcentury that it was among “the most beautiful, best, and pleasantest rivers in the world.” Hudson and early Dutch settlers likely saw Natives in canoes who already had a claim to it. They called it Lenape Whittuck, “river of the Lenape,” or Lenape Sipu. The Dutch called it Viskill, “great fish river.” Delaware comes from Thomas West, the Baron de la Warr, the first governor of Jamestown, who never actually saw the bay, river, or people that would bear his name.

Once seriously impaired, from the 1900s to the 1972 Clean Water Act, the health of the river is widely hailed as an environmental success story, earning 2020 “Rver of the Year” honors from the organization American Rivers. Two-thirds of my trip is through a Wild and Scenic River, a federal designation intended to safeguard the “outstandingly remarkable” values of a river (less than one percent of U.S. rivers have this designation), but this river will not feel that wild. In fact, part of what intrigues me about it is the way it interlaces with history, slices through river towns, including this one, Hancock, but also Port Jervis, Dingman’s Ferry, Easton, Upper Black Eddy, Frenchtown, Stockton, Lambertville, New Hope.

A writer of both ponds and rivers, Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal (July 2, 1858) that rivers had more of a “liberating influence” than lakes, leading our eyes and thoughts to the sea, to ports near and far, transporting us in body and spirit: “A river touching the back of a town is like a wing, it may be unused as yet, but ready to waft it over the world. With its rapid current it is a slightly fluttering wing. River towns are winged towns.”

These towns grew up along the river because the river provided a kind of highway, and our civilization’s first footsteps, paths, and roads were often guided by rivers. A river runs through the first written story circa 1800 BC, pieced together through fragmentary tablets. King Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu unleash the wrath of the gods when they cut down trees from a sacred forest and float them downriver, resulting in Enkidu’s death. Gilgamesh sails to the underworld to search for immortality, meets a Noah-like survivor of a river flood, but returns empty-handed. Upon his death, the people of Uruk divert the Euphrates and bury the king so that once the river resumes its normal course it flows over the dead king’s grave. Time, and rivers, can’t be beaten. Or they are kings and spirits themselves.

In the Bible, a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, then divided into four branches. “Shall we gather at the river?” the song asks. “Take me to the river,” sing the Talking Heads (via Al Green). Jersey’s Boss sings about going down to the river to dive, to wash away the despair.

Rivers carry people and goods but also meaning. And this one means something to me.

My own story starts in the city where I will end. I was born in Trenton and grew up in one of those winged towns, Titusville. It’s just upstream from the site of Washington’s historic crossing, which imbued the place with more significance, more meaning.

I worked summers at a marina and canoe outfitter. People would rent canoes and take them upstream, or I would drive them. On a wall near the register were listed the towns and their mileages, and we had maps. From the Delaware River Basin Commission’s recreation maps grew a lifetime love of maps and the geographical imagination. These river maps listed the rapids and their difficulty, the islands and towns, channels and their depths, bridges and boat ramps. But a river is always less static than a map, constantly moving, the bank and islands adding and subtracting, new rocks in rapids, making new waves.

I knew my little home stretch of river well, starting when I was young and learning to swim. There were big, submerged rocks that we kids would stumble into, stand on so water was knee high, dive from. We learned to know all the bumps in our section, from our floating dock to the next upstream neighbors, the Millers. Then the longer section of town, a few rocks to be avoided, lest a propeller blade shear off. My dad had a wall of these torn-up props, used in the service of better knowing and “mapping” the river.

We pick up scars along the way—in the service of learning, we hope.

On recent visits, I see new rocks in the old swimming hole, a few new buoys to mark the rogue rocks in the wider river, dislodged by ice or flood. It changes but doesn’t change. We leave it but it doesn’t leave us.

If I knew that home stretch, I used to think I would want to know the whole thing, every other little segment. But a river is a wide watershed of topography and vegetation and all the tributaries that feed the river, the little trickling streams that feed those. The source is never finite, nor is the end. I can’t of course know it all, but here again a river is a metaphor. I can know some of it very well, and certainly learn as much as I can about these 200 miles between me and home. “You can comprehend a piece of river,” writes John Graves in Goodbye to a River, a book I read just as the pandemic lockdown ensued. It fit the tone of the moment: weary, troubled, isolated.

He was saying goodbye to the Brazos, soon (in the 1950s) to be dammed. I don’t have an urgent reason for being here, such as seeing the river for the last time. It’s more that I want to see it for the first time all over again. And it’s not that I want to test myself in the wild (and scenic). I’m well aware of that narrative too. I’m here mostly out of curiosity, to check in with myself and this river that has run throughout my childhood and life.

Besides, I’ve paddled segments of it, but never the whole thing continuously. I dislike the term “bucket list”—things to do before one kicks the bucket. As if we need a reason to attempt otherwise “daring” things only if framed in the face of death. Would not fun and curiosity be enough? The pandemic reminded all of us of our need for connection with others and with the flow and movement of things outside.

I took one of my first canoe trips on a summer afternoon when I was 12. Some neighbors gathered and borrowed some of Abbott’s Marine canoes, the big heavy aluminum Grumman kind. They weren’t the artful birchbarks of old and lacked refinement and were instead manufactured after the war as Grumman sought business beyond aerospace. But they brought boats to the masses that were nearly indestructible, if famous for getting hung up. Aluminum may be a good, cheap material to rivet into a canoe shape, but it lacks glide, often leaving silver marks on rocks. Punctures could be fixed with more rivets or solder.

We piled into boats, me proudly steering from the stern. My mother packed some cold chicken we ate on the silty bank. I tried to mimic my older neighbors Bob Miller and Jim Abbott, navigate through the riffles so as not to hang up, learning to read the water and downward-facing V. Grace, power, control. It’s an afternoon I remember to this day: sparkling water, paddle T-grip in hand, sunbaked seats. In my teens, when my father’s business went belly-up, we went canoeing rather than take some expensive vacation. In my early 20s, three friends and I drove all night to Narrowsburg, putting in at fog-lifting dawn, eating psychedelic mushrooms at dusk. Thirty, a trip with the woman I would marry, following some cedar waxwings around a bend. In my 40s, some trips with my kids, pretending that I was injured and that my son and his friend would have to canoe me out, à la Burt Reynolds/Lewis in Deliverance. We spied a falcon under the Scudders Falls Bridge, saw an osprey dive, watched that incredible focused intensity, headlong for water then flip position to feet first, splash, clutch wriggling fish, regroup and fly off, high-pitched screeching over the catch. Ospreys, falcons, eagles—all part of the comeback of the river. All part of the reason I’ve returned, come back, in my 50s. Though I’m more a bird enthusiast than an expert. For that matter, I’m more a canoe and camping enthusiast than an expert.

Trips begot other trips, and taught me this much: do your best, bring what you need, prepare for the journey ahead, and hope not to be dashed on the rocks downstream. If you do flip, hang in there with the boat until you can find an eddy and place on shore to empty the water.

The river made a place in two of my three books—now it gets its own. When I finished the first, based on a dissertation 25 years ago, I made a file of things that might be my next project, calling it “River.” In that project on literary cartography, I mused on the geographic border I saw out my bedroom window. On maps, a fixed line, but my border moved. And in a project about getting kids outside, experiencing wonder, I talked about finding swimming holes (beginning with my first), days on the river in boats, a fishing-birding-swimming picnic. My last dealt with climate change in the South, so the river was excluded, but with me in spirit, as I visited the “birthplace of rivers” in West Virginia. And sleeping beside one, I drank in the murmur of a river, faint gurgle, hiss and hum.

One question I continue to ask, in the wake of that travel to climate-afflicted regions, is how do we care for a place in a time of upheaval and loss?

That book covered the climate circumstances in seven southern states and one mountainous one, involving a lot of travel through a wide expanse. The climate situation will worsen in the coming years, and we are already seeing effects on rivers like the Delaware, with increased rainfall and flooding (drought in the West). But rather than wrap my head around such an extensive region, or problem, I aim to zero in. One question I continue to ask, in the wake of that travel to climate-afflicted regions, is how do we care for a place in a time of upheaval and loss?

All three projects relate to the sense of place, the specific conditions of topography and climate and culture that make places unique, worthy of attention. And for the way they reach deep inside us. When I return to my hometown, the first thing I do, before the greetings or hugs, is walk to the bank and look at the river, where there is so much to learn: the water level based on the large rock we could not dislodge, the recent rains based on the color and speed of the current, and just the silty scent will release a surge of memory and association. I’ve brought all those I’ve loved there, and in some ways it was a first love, a place of birth. A place to begin again.

This story has yet another origin. Two years before the date of this trip I fell down. I began that August morning ready to get back to work and school. I had syllabi to prepare and an annual report to finish. Emails to catch up on at my writing desk. But my left hand was not cooperating, and I, nauseous, tried to make my way to the couch, when my left foot gave out. I tried to pull myself up, using the leg of a chair, but only the right arm would grab. I had no idea what was happening, but the medics my wife and daughter called confirmed that I had had, was having, a transient ischemic attack, a small stroke. I was flown to a Roanoke hospital where they had an emergency stroke center. The doctor inserted something like nitroglycerin into my femoral artery and watched my blood vessels on a monitor, like a river and its tributaries. The dyed material traveled up to the clot, halted, then up around the brain through something called the circle of Willis, and attacked from the top. The dam in the vessels dislodged. When it did, I squeezed the doctor’s hand and opened my eyes.

Sometime that summer, or just days before, I had “dissected” my right internal carotid artery, meaning I had developed a small tear. This usually happens to those who experience whiplash, but I could remember no such event. The tear was like a kink in a hose, and the clot was helping with the repair, but when a piece of that shot up, I went down. During a right-sided stroke you are barely aware of what is happening, and notoriously, among family and friends, I was dubious of the severity. About the helicopter, I made the “it will cost money” sign with my thumb and forefinger. I’ve always been calm in stressful situations and remained so horizontally on a stretcher to the hospital and into the helicopter. When it lifted up and over the Blue Ridge Mountains, I strained my injured neck to look at the folds and ridges below. Tucked into the shadows—flowing water, the sources of rivers. You can’t have them without mountains. I’m not sure if I was simply sneaking a peek, but perhaps, like nature writers John Muir and Ralph Waldo Emerson—who both nearly lost their sight—vowed I would see and do all that I could, savoring the view, the very moment.

I seemed to have made a full recovery, but days after, I discovered I had blurred vision in one eye—possible optic nerve damage. Moments later, some good friends showed up in my hospital room, and though the eye wasn’t working as it should, the tear ducts still did. The realization had hit me that it all could have been much, much worse.

I won’t be walking to the Gulf of Mexico, like Muir, but I will be taking this trip. I set out by myself two years from the anniversary of the fall, and once again a year later with the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania, who make the trip every four years as the Rising Nation River Journey. I learned about their trip late in the summer, when trying to find more stories about people and the river. Having seen it all by myself, I wanted to see it as others did, and who better to learn from about the history and health of the river than the first people who lived on and tended it?

Floating a river, you realize the ways its story meanders into one’s own. Rapids, eddies, and islands are the risks, pauses, and periods of isolation one experiences in a life. Rifts in the river relate to other personal or cultural fissures. Rivers change and heal themselves, as they are themselves healing.

You can’t go home again, famously, nor can you step in the same river twice, but you can return to the scene of a crime, of love, of happiness. Places and rivers remain and, even if changed, or altered, are what is immortal. Now to float some of that fluttering wing.