Schuylkill, Var and Thames
I have always lived near rivers and they have always held some mystery for me. I don’t know why, but I really like them and the path to my heart is lined with steep muddy banks.
When I was eleven or twelve, I started collecting stones from rivers. It’s a weird time in anyone’s life - I didn’t get the idea from anywhere, but I gather a bunch from the places I had been or from people I knew who went somewhere. I had pebbles from the Hudson, the Volga, Seine, Liffey, Danube and the Mississippi - each had its own story I would never know.
There was a whole shelf in my room full of rocks that had sat at the bottom of rivers that in time ran through the cities built around them. Who had once skimmed them across the surface before they sank? What lovers wooed as they floated over in boats, oblivious? From which hillside tributary had this stone rolled and tumbled and grew worn and small before coming to rest in my bedroom?
It was a thinking point for me, and a project. I don’t think I ever said to any friends “Hey look - stones.” I just think it was something I enjoyed having that meant more than the thing I had. I liked that there was a personal and worldly connection with a common theme.
The idea fizzled out of course, because of lots of reasons:
1. I discovered girls and computers, at mutually exclusive intervals
2. In most cities, it’s actually hard to get down to the river’s edge and when you do there’s normally building rubble and silt between you and the ground.
3. I forgot to label them, so they got all mixed up, which kind of ruined (or maybe proved) the point of doing something like this.
So one day they I just threw them out and forgot about them.
Some years later, and I’m writing in this blog that families are like rivers and there are at least ten excellent songs about rivers and it made me remember the stones. So I wrote about them and you ended up here reading this.
The stones themselves have gone full circle. They sat around wherever for thousands of years until I came along with an idea. They were picked up and put on a shelf in my room for a bit. They were thrown out, went back to being an idea and the stones will go back to sitting around wherever for thousands of years after I go.
Maybe they had no business being out of the river in the first place.
Ah well, don’t let it spoil your weekend or pay it more mind than you have to spare. Have a good one.
OK, you got me - the Hudson is not a river. It’s a fjord, because the bed of land was ground out by glaciers which melted, leaving the rising sea level to flood the land with water. Technically, it’s arm of the Atlantic Ocean which rises and falls with the salty tide, so it’s not a river.
I also think remembering this is a signal to trigger the next thing I’m going to do online. Think of a few rivers running in their own course and a connection between them and then you’re getting close. Watch this space - June 19.
In next week: a new song, an update on my surprise return to print media and eleven handy tips to help you brighten up dark corners of your home. Plus - “Does your dog blog?” - pets who dish the dirt online. Ok, two of those are lies. I’m seriously going now. Bye. What? No, bye. Really. Stop messing about! No, you hang up first. No, you hang up. Come on hang up. Hello? Hell-ooooo-ooooo? Hello? Oh.
May 26th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
You don’t think the Hudson would be called a river up by West Point? I think oyu can get near it up there. Don’t really want to get near it in the city!
June 12? Not June 19? OR do I need to circle another date on the calendar?
I really wish you’d labelled those rocks. I only have two rocks from my youth- a piece of Maroon Bells, near Aspen, Colorado, and a lava rock from the beach where they filmed Magnum PI.
Oddly enough, both are in teh same aquarium.
Maroon Bells used to be my favorite place int eh world, when I was young. My family would go to Aspen every summer in the ’60s, because we lived in Colordao and my father had a friend who lived there. We, the children, took my parents to Aspen to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary and found it had changted quite a bit. Not the least change was that you couldn’t get to Maroon Bells any more- except by BUS. That took a lot of the romance out of it for me. OR maybe put it elsewhere.
May 26th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
19th - you’re right. I’m a fool.
I take your point but the Hudson, technically, isn’t a river.
There are probably loads of mountains that aren’t mountains and definitely seas that are just big lakes.
May 26th, 2006 at 2:18 pm
OK, I’ll buy the Hudson Fjord.
I know some ponds that have aspirations to being lakes, and lakes that have aspirations to being seas, and seas that have aspirations toward oceanhood.
Do creeks and streams want to be rivers when they grow up, or are they really just trying to be a part of the Ocean?
Ambition can be so ugly.
May 27th, 2006 at 11:06 pm
I don’t even know how I stumbled onto your blog, but this was such a nice post, I felt I had to share a similarly themed story.
When I was four years old, I found a sand dollar on the beach in the Puget Sound area of the Pacific Northwest. I was amazed by the design on it, the idea of it being a creature (or former one) and decided to wrap it up and keep it forever. I rediscovered it many, many years later, still wrapped up and in one piece, in a section of a small jewelry box I’d had as a child.
A friend now sends me sand dollars from all the beaches she visits. They rest in a pewter dish with my original find, for all to see.
May 27th, 2006 at 11:31 pm
That’s a great story. I have a tobacco tin of shark’s teeth from Sarasota somewhere. One day I’ll find them and I don’t mind not knowing where they are now. It’s kind of good just knowing I kept them
May 28th, 2006 at 3:13 am
Won’t the tobacco stain the shark teeth?
January 31st, 2007 at 6:38 am
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