I’ve known rivers
Rivers run through my biography and are especially salient to me right now. [UPDATED]
“Afro-American Literature” was one of the college courses I took that has enduring impact on the way I understand both parts of the African American experience, in W.E.B. DuBois’s formulation of the “two souls” of “black folk.” I wrote a term paper on “Langston Hughes,” whom I dubbed “the blues writer of Harlem.” Of the many poems he wrote that have continuing resonance for me are this one, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Credit: From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1994 the Estate of Langston Hughes. Poets.org
For me this poem re–centers African civilization, “written out” of “history” by the colonial project. It also re–centers a vital aspect of Nature, before internal combustion the primary mode of transportation and trade, not to mention a mode of sustenance. It’s said that the course of the Amazon River has been shaped by human habitation, and it can be seen from space. I hope my use of this poem illuminates more than appropriates.
I’ve been thinking about rivers in Maine since I took note of how many I crossed on the coastal trip north on Route 1, and thereafter on trips on US 95 between Massachusetts and through Southern Maine. Waves of vacationers flock to the beaches, the rocky coast, the islands, the lakes, and mountains. Certainly some paddle on some of the rivers. But rivers are not as frequently depicted in Maine iconography as the other geographical features of the state.
The Piscataqua, and the Great Bay to its east form the gateway between Portsmouth, NH, and Kittery, ME. I’ve cycled around the Great Bay and from Massachusetts through Seacoast NH to Kittery. The next most salient to me is the Saco, wending its way through the rich bottomlands of Western Maine in the foothills of the White Mountains of New Hampshire to divide the twin cities of Saco and Biddeford, those old mill towns. Similarly, the Androscoggin divides the more notable twin cities of Lewiston and Auburn, often mentioned in the same breath, and nearly a year ago the site of so much tragedy. The Androscoggin also divides Topsham and Brunswick, with an historic footbridge crossed by mill workers living in the former and working in the latter.
A sign in the park on the Brunswick sign of the river warns that it is illegal to take sturgeon out of the river.
I sat and watched these sturgeon jump in the Kennebec River in the riverfront park in Hallowell, two miles from the state capital, Augusta, after visiting the famed Liberal Cup brewpub and before heading to a Michael Franti concert at Snow Pond Center for the Arts in Sidney, which is to say “at band camp.”
It’s further down the Kennebec that on a recommendation from a friend, that in late spring of this year I took a hike to Squirrel Point Light and Bald Head.
One may well wonder why a lighthouse is needed on the river, until one considers the shipyard in Bath, the soundings in the river, and the fog that can collect down by the state park beaches of Popham and Reid State Park, even on as fair a day as I had visited the lighthouse.
On that day, I felt particularly close to my paternal grandfather, who about a hundred years ago worked at “the shipyard” in Bath, before he moved back closer to family in New York.
For the past few weeks I’d been staying with friends in Durham, along the Androscoggin, which I’ve seen every morning I’ve headed out away from their property. Not having thought about how their road loops back around like a ‘J’ back toward the river, I’d not realized how close they were to it, even as the fog swells up from it these late fall days.
I’d driven along that river five days a week for an academic year out to Bates College in Lewiston, where I’d worked in the beginning of the end of the pandemic, when vaccinations, testing, masking, and social distancing kept a lid on outbreaks during in–person learning. I’d always been struck by how little habitation there had been along it despite its proximity to civilization. It’s what got me thinking about the people who lived along the river before the settler colonials had arrived to displace them.
But it’s at the business end of the Kennebec that I’ve been staying for the past few days, in Bath, retracing my grandfather’s steps, but not his literally across the Hudson, in the city of my birth in New York. When he was young, the Hudson had frozen over, and he walked to the other side. There are stories told about his time in Bath. The fellow tossing him hot rivets to be pounded into a ship’s superstructure kept missing, so he chased him around the scaffolding with one, to repay the favor. Also, he was swimming once, and felt someone alongside, slapping him on the back. It had been a seal. No doubt these stories had grown taller in the telling, as I heard them from my father, his son.
I’m writing most of this post from a coffeeshop in downtown Bath, sleepily gentrifying despite the fact that BIW, Bath Iron Works, is ground zero for organized labor in the state. It produces high tech ships for the US Navy to project US power around the globe, ensuring the free flow of the goods that fuel our consumption, including the flow of our coffee.
Rivers are not one dimensionally economic, however, and the draw I’m trying to capture here involves the spiritual components that are tied up with the material. Feng Shui suggests it is better to be located on a concave bend in the river, embraced on three sides by water, than a convex one which spirits energy away. Trevor Hall sings of Narmada, the river said to be Śiva’s daughter, which sprung from the perspiration on his brow during deep meditation. It’s the river in which the Ganga is said to wash.
Surviving as I am now from generosity to generosity, I think of the sense of survival and homecoming in the song “Lights Along the River” by Maine’s own Mallet Brothers, sons of the author of “The Garden Song,” made so famous by Pete Seeger, who spearheaded the sloop Clearwater, dedicated to cleaning up the Hudson.
Rivers spring from secret sources miles inland and flow to the sea, and/or ebb and flow with the tides of the sea. They are the pulse of Earth our Mother, sustaining us. I think of the early EDM band Transglobal Underground in “Delta Disco” likening the Nile’s ebb and flow to the pulsing dance of a disco.
I’ve known rivers. Rivers trickle and flood into my awareness, inspiring awe and inviting my devotion. This devotion includes acknowledgement of a still ineffable presence, which my words cannot adequately embrace, much less possess. I offer my reverence to rivers.
UPDATE: How could I have forgotten to include this gorgeous song “Into the River” by Starling Arrow et. al., which I heard on the “Why Mindfulness Isn’t Enough” episode of The Emerald this weekend?
