On Rivers and Water and Learning New Things
A discovery I hadn't expected
Ages ago, I had a friend from South Carolina visit me in southern Colorado. I took her to the Arkansas River in Pueblo. She walked up to the bank and snort-laughed. “That’s not a river!”
I was slightly affronted. Of course it’s a river, I said, but she shook her head. You just haven’t seen a real river.
I have discovered that she was right. Where I come from, rivers are just starting out—the headwaters of the Colorado, the Rio Grande, and the Platte all start in the Rocky Mountains. So early in their journeys, they’re unassuming beings. In Pueblo, you can cross the Arkansas without getting your calves wet unless its spring runoff.
We moved to Oregon for the ocean. I didn’t know enough to expect pleasure from rivers.
This week we drove a big circle to pick up groceries like good dog food and the organic frozen things I like, then through the woods to the county seat where I’ve been serving on the grand jury every Tuesday this month (so interesting!!). It’s a small county, with villages of a few hundred or maybe a few thousand people, and they’re all linked together in a network of two lane roads. At first, I didn’t get it—that you’d drive up to Coquille to that nursery because they have the best hanging baskets, and over to Charleston for shrubs and big pots (and coffee shop!), down 101 to Dragonfly for a vast array of plants and the bonus of the excellent music. Some of the roads are twisty, through the forest, dark and a little alarming.
A lot of them run along rivers. In a couple of places the road and the river are so close that if there’s a big storm and the tide is coming in, the river swallows the road for a bit.
Many of you have likely grown up with big rivers. They’re not actually rare. It’s just that as a woman of the West, I hadn’t met them. You might take them for granted. I’m still too staggered, and maybe I never want to be. I mean, look at those clouds! The reflections!
The river in my town is the Coquille, and it’s massive by the time in empties into the ocean. Not New Orleans Mississippi massive, but pretty great. I love to go down to the port and watch birds and admire the boats in the marina, but mostly it’s all about the mirror of the water and sky.
Another water feature here is the lakes that appear once the rains begin. On that drive to Coquille, there are fields filled with livestock through the summer. This is what they look like a month into the rainy season:
Isn’t that crazy? In my old world, this would be a flood of enormous and disastrous proportions, but here, this is just winter. And again, look at those reflections!
I haven’t begun to learn what rivers will teach me. What should I look for? What do you know about them? Did you grow up with big rivers like this?
Likely because my growing-up years were walking distance to the South Umpqua, and visiting Bandon for the best family vacations, I love your experience along the Coquille. In retirement now we are just a brief walk from Rickreall Creek which looks like a river in the winter. I feel my heart swell when we see the Willamette. Thank you for these thoughts.
I grew up around big rivers, the Columbia for one, and the Puyallup. Find the shallow tributaries to look for spawning salmon, they are amazing to watch when they’re swimming up stream.