All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full;
unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.
—Ecclesiastes 1:7
My mortgage says I’ll never die, just pay hundreds of dollars a month forever. Television advertising suggests that if we just solve the bladder and joint and bowel problems of this generation of old people, there aren’t going to be any more old people. Especially not me. But as soon as I open a history book on the level of nations or movements that span more than one generation, I have to face the knowledge my ego won’t allow—I’m just a passing thing.
Looking at history from the standpoint of messy generation after messy generation made the writer of Ecclesiastes a pessimist: “The thing that hath been is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.” Weariness and vanity. Early Jewish scholars are reputed to have argued about whether this unique text should stay in the Old Testament or not, but the rumor persisted that Solomon himself had written the piece. It stayed, thus preserving some of the loveliest thought owned by our culture. Much of the beauty comes from the overview itself. The way rivers are beautiful from the air, the way earth is beautiful from space.
Human activity viewed from such a distant platform is a swiftly revolving door—birth and death over and over again. It is a perspective without detail and without voice but with its own discouraging poetic: “A time to be born, and a time to die” and “The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong.” But I forgive this writer who finds women even “more bitter than death” because he admits he’s not sure that dogs won’t go to heaven. “They are all one breath,” he says of men and beasts.
I think I understand why he’s in such a bad mood.
I feel this way every morning from about 3:00 to 4:30 a.m. That’s the time of generalities, when sleep has removed me to an outer space from where nothing is visible but aging and loss, far from the particular joys of hugging my kid or eating a sandwich. Between 3:00 and 4:30, if I get up to pee, that’s particular enough and I’m OK again. Another way I enter the doldrums is when my mom sends me one of those big epic historical novels with the man and woman embracing in torn-up clothes on the cover, the kind of book that covers four generations and buries three of them—in which characters drop like flies. Reading one of those puts me in a dust-to-dust mood for days. It is a crazy-making virtual reality of hard closure where all loose ends are tacked down before the final page and lives are spent like nickels. This kind of long view is breathtaking in two senses: it is vast, and it is a thief of detail.
I prefer a particular kind of history whose very unimportance is profound, which examines even a day or a conversation and is not consumed by its flowing backdrop. Dorothy Stone, an old woman in McGrath, uses a ski pole for a cane. Winter and summer she walks the road and when you meet her, she starts right in the middle of the story: “We had foxes. Way up the river. My son and daughter-in-law are up there now.” She doesn’t remember me, though a few times each summer we have coffee and cake at my house. I see her walking by and go out to get her. She says, “I had a good husband. Politician. I used to know the people who lived in this house.” She is looking at my house. “They had a little girl.” My daughter, the current little girl, will come out to see the rocks Dorothy has in her pockets today, because Dorothy always picks up tiny stones that look like they have noses and eyes and mouths and shows them to anyone who stops to talk to her. After three or four rocks, Kari loses interest and wanders off, but Dorothy shows me several more. “Look, here’s a cute little fellow. See him? He’s laughing at us! I used to be a schoolteacher. You have to show children, or they won’t learn.” I say yes. And I offer her coffee because one time she told me that everyone thinks old people drink only tea. She accepts, and when we are inside the house I put out canned milk, even though she told me the miners drink it because they ran away from their mothers too soon. She pours a little milk in her coffee today and takes a teaspoon of sugar.
Dorothy doesn’t remember who we are, but she likes us. If I bring out one of the local historical calendars, she’ll page through it and tell me stories about the people in the pictures, half of whom she is related to. Her stepfather, Charles Koenig, drove a mail team through Ophir to Flat, the end of the line from Fairbanks. Her mother, Helen, came from a family of reindeer herders near Bethel. Dorothy was schooled at the Catholic mission at Holy Cross and went to Chicago for the Eucharistic Convention of 1926. “It was a biiiiiiiig town. I held on to Father’s skirt. I was so scared he would leave me!”
There is little continuity in what I know about Dorothy, only pictures and pieces, and I am a stranger each time I greet her. But the frame itself provides continuity: the stories she tells to introduce herself, the familiar offering of coffee, the river town where we like to talk to each other. People pass by on the river and we invite them in, one by one, detail by detail.
Alaska rivers provide a point of view on history, one that does not deaden and discourage the watcher. In Alaska, rivers are still a serviceable metaphor for history because there are few roads, and despite the all-important coming of airplanes and airstrips, the river serves as road, stage, human journey. Especially before the advent of bush television in 1980, river villagers pulled out couches and chairs and left them on the bank for years. It was all the news: Who’s on the river? Who’s coming to visit? It was and is an attention to the river itself: Is it rising and getting dirty or falling and clearing up? Did the ice move? Is the channel open?
For those looking for a quintessential Alaskan thing, my vote is not for the cute little face made from the caribou anus, but for the couches that sit up above the freeway at Eklutna. I saw them twenty years ago, with people on them, and the people were just sitting there watching the cars go by. Last Thursday the couches were still there, maybe the same ones, but without the people. Twenty below and several inches of snow on the cushions should explain the absence of life. But those couches are prima facie evidence that rivers and travelers on rivers have been of singular importance to Alaskans, such importance that a road’s mere similarity to a river is enough to make a person drag out a couch and sit down to examine the wayfarers. God knows if the sparrow falls, but the folks at Eklutna know that I’ve been to the dentist, to the grocery store, to pick up my mother at the airport. The fact that eighty bazillion people Eklutnians don’t know are going back and forth on the highway hasn’t discouraged their attention in at least twenty years. So I hope it was the cold and the snow that emptied the couches, and not that looking down at car after car full of strangers on errand after errand made the watchers feel their observations were futile and in vain.
For many towns in the Alaska bush, the river is a road to be tended to winter and summer, with short, dangerous interruptions at freezeup and breakup time. When you live with maintained roads that connect all across the country, it seems that rivers are untrustworthy and full of danger, if they are anything at all to us, but in the interior of Alaska the rivers stretch farther, join more communities, carry more freight still. They are as reliably treacherous and changeable as the weather. People live with them, on them, with knowledge and skills gone from roaded landscapes. The barge captains who make their way up from Kotzebue on the Kobuk, from St. Mary’s on the Yukon, from Bethel on the Kuskokwim, all know what each riffle hides, what each cutbank tells about the location of the channel, what the wind will do to the boat when they come around the next finger of silt and spruce. The river they travel is not just one river, but rivers within rivers, rich with episodes and dangers and prescriptions.
There was a Yukon River pilot who could not read to pass his Coast Guard examination, but he drew the officials a map of the entire route he would run, every cutbank, every sandbar and eddy in such detail that they gave him his license. The story is surprising to me: the kindness of the officials and the confident will of the pilot.
It is difficult—without listening to their voices, indeed without living their lives—to imagine what a former generation of Alaskans hoped the rivers would bring. Spending time where rivers—not roads—are primary, river people drag you into the texture of history. The roads around McGrath are bad, dusty, and rough, and many people use all-terrain “wheelers” instead of passenger vehicles. This shifts the concept of traveling in a car or truck to novelty, even luxury. After a summer of bicycles and wheelers and boats, my five-year-old daughter begged to ride in her father’s work truck. A few weeks later, she glowed with pride when our friend Barb toured us around town in the old Chevy she had Northern Air Cargo fly out from Kenai. It is a pleasure when our habits are rearranged so that we can see them. One laughing moment in my job as a forest fire dispatcher was toppling an Anchorage dispatcher’s belief that he would be trucking fire supplies out to McGrath. His refusal to understand that there were no roads through the Alaska Range prolonged and sweetened the discussion for several minutes. Not being able to get here by road is an exotic idea for an American in the early part of the twenty-first century. And the exotic is charming, which hides its importance.
I do not know more than five bends of the river at McGrath, but this small knowledge helps to pry open the primacy of river that is new to me and old to the world, to make me aware of the barges and the older steamboats, parts and pieces that stick up through the surface at low water. Walking slowly leaning on sticks, quiet in their houses, the aging practitioners of the river life are seldom visible in this small town. When the river comes up in the spring, plugged with ice downstream or swelled to the top of the bank with August rains, then I see Einer or Tex for the first time, hobbling down to the bank or riding a wheeler. A government program built them a line of houses, which they themselves have named “death row,” but I’ve heard this black humor only secondhand.
In fact, everything I haven’t directly heard the old people say about themselves separates me from them: how many miles one traveled on a dog sled to dance all night in Ophir, the clunky old troop carrier another sailed single-handedly from Seattle to Bethel, the kids another taught to read in a shack on a willow bank. Mostly they don’t spare a glance for the townspeople who haven’t sought them out; their attention is for the river. What will it do? Over the banks or not?
This attention to the river is compelling and can teach us younger ones to look too. Even the very young. In a world of Nintendo and malls and motorcycles, eleven-year-old Aaron took a look at the big McGrath flood of 1991 and announced gravely, “Now I’ve seen everything.”
Ethnographers everywhere are noticing a curious phenomenon: after dutifully announcing year after year that a particular generation of old people are the last to hold on to a story, a song, a point of view, another generation of old people suddenly pops up that knows the words. To everything there is a season: “a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.”
River-watching is preserved here as attitude long after the particularity of river travel and the knowledge of old travelers is gone. Bush airports gather storefronts and houses as rivers used to, but rivers and their functions are not yet completely gone, and houses and storefronts do not just turn themselves around. When we were in the village of Kobuk and an airplane came in, we’d follow the small crowd’s circuitous route to greet it. And when it was us arriving at the airstrip, we’d follow the mail and packages back through town, walking up behind the school and through dog lots and caches to the postmaster’s house. I always had a sense that I was sneaking up the back way, as if the town’s attention was turned in another direction—toward the river.
There’s a lot of scorn from some visitors about the way Alaska villages and towns look, all spread out and “junky,” disorganized. But when you come in from the airstrip, the way most visitors come, you’re coming from the dog-lot side. Unless it’s a town built around an airstrip, such as a mining town up in the mountains or an Air Force station, the buildings aren’t looking at you when you come in on an airplane. They are tending the water, where the boats and fish and visitors came from historically. The water flows in the direction of Kotzebue, Seattle, San Francisco, the rest of the world. The barge will land here with gas, fuel, oil, Sheetrock, and metal roofing. “When will my new truck get here?” “I’m gonna run out of gas if the barge doesn’t get here by Tuesday.” To build your house away from the water is like sitting in a room with your back to the light.
Alaskans are reluctant to abandon their homes and places of business on the side of the river, even when the river threatens them with flooding each spring and in many rainy Augusts. The Bureau of Indian Affairs built Galena a “new town” in the 1970s, but for years people would move back to the bank of the Yukon, to the little line of cabins and shacks outside the big nine-mile circle of dike that held the air force station and runway. There were three towns in town: the Air Force, the “old town,” and the neat little BIA subdivisions with the houses looking at each other in rows. Twice in recent decades, six feet of water and ice have flowed through old-town houses for a week. Many of their owners camped out on the dike, played cards, built campfires, and waited patiently for the river to leave their living rooms. No wonder the rivers towns need to watch the river. It’s like waiting for the mail: bad news, good news.
When I come back to a river town at the end of a day of eddies and cutbanks and gravel bars and moose in the willows, I feel like the town has been watching for me, watching from storefronts or the chair on the bank. A neighbor may see me come in and walk down and grab the line at the bow of the boat to pull it up the bank and tie it up in its place—my place. I believe the people on the couches above the freeway, even with a chain-link fence between them and the seventymile-an-hour traffic below, still hold a kind of vestigial voyeurism and faithfulness to neighbors.
Many present-day Americans from roaded areas can grasp some universal concept of river but not specific ones. To a city person, a wild caribou becomes abstract; it stands for nature but without the specific qualities of the caribou you hunt and eat—without the round circles chiseled on top of each other in the beaten snow of the trail or the hollow clicking sound of caribou ankles moving through the brush in front of you, like a handful of sixth graders popping their index fingers out of their cheeks.
Where I grew up, the river is beautiful and dirty and in the way. It is the famous Snake River, and it divides the landscape like a wall. I have felt drawn to the riverside as to a blank thing ready for meaning—a void left over from an old usefulness of rivers. When I’m standing by the Snake, I often have the curious experience of not being able to recognize whose house is on the other side unless I am close to where the bridge crosses. I will look across at Joe Witte’s square fields sloping up from the river’s far side and not recognize them. His farm could be the moon, so far removed from the possibility of going there. I can’t recognize the place across the river because I can’t go across the river at that place.
Standing in Joe Witte’s cornfield down in “the Bend,” that little chunk of Oregon nestled inside a curve of the Snake, I can gaze at the other side of the river, that picturesque but foreign place, and recognize, with surprise, that I am looking at my friend Carol’s house. No one I know thinks of crossing the Snake River with a boat to get to the other side, though it is a broad, smooth river. There are no boats tied up along the bank. Not being able to get there from here becomes not being able to think about that from here. The white house with its fence and flowers, a stone’s throw away if you have an arm like George Washington, is to my mind’s map about seventeen miles away, all on roads.
Other than interdictions like “Don’t go near it,” nobody paid the Snake River much attention when I lived there. Even now the new houses built along the river in the town where I grew up face away from it, toward Main Street and the highway a half mile away. If you were a traveler on the river (and you wouldn’t be) you’d climb up the bank and be greeted by all the backyards of town, the junk cars and weed patches, and you’d think, “What a neglected, scraggly little town.” All the new little trees along main street and the one-hole outhouse labeled “city hall,” a wry comment on government, would be lost on you.
There were different ideas about the Snake River at the town of Adrian when people traveled on it and before bridges when you had to come across on the ferry. There’s one building left on the Snake that looks at the river across from Adrian. It was a store and ferry boat station, and it is very old—nothing left of it but a silvery-gray shell of planks. But it is obvious from the opposite bank, where the town sits, that the building tended the river and not the road. It looks too close, unwisely close, to the bank. From its own side of the river, coming up behind it on the little highway from Roswell, you see its back like the back of a man standing off to the side, turning away from you so he can take a leak.
There are few square fields in Alaska to draw attention away from the sweep and suck of rivers—their dangerous, necessary utility. Here, you are never far from the knowledge that the valley was carved by the river, the valley serves the river, and the river can take it back. The evidence is in the shapes of sloughs and in the meadows left by old sloughs, like the tracks left by some monstrous procession of caribou at the beginning of time, sloughs like the front curves of hooves separated by trees like green stacks of eyebrows. The old Yup’ik people say yes, raising their eyebrows. The land raises its eyebrows in the old bends of rivers, says yes to river, winter, ice, change.
Heraclitus is at home here, telling us we cannot dip into the same river twice, that we itself is a convention, whether vanity or bravery. The river cannot flow around the same us twice, still we wish to hang a name on ourselves that will hide our movement, limit and contain the daily and seasonal changes and the shifting of channels over a continuum. There are the changes of weather: rise and fall and “Better check the boat—it’ll take four of us to get it down the bank and in the river again,” or “Better go bail it out and tie it up high.” And there are seasons: rainy season or low water or the ice coming, bringing the river to a stop, boats long stored away for the winter and then the whole land filling up like a sponge in springtime until even the river comes up, up nearly over the bank, thousands of square miles saturated with melting snow coming down and the rivers still plugged up, oatmeal in the drain, clotted with rotten ice.
And there are the changes that official deeds and appraisals and surveys deny: we drive out on the one road to look at the place where the river wants to come through above the town, trying to make us an island, trying to make the river in front of us a slough. A woman in California writes the city of McGrath a letter asking about her property, but her property is gone, the last of it sifting into the Kuskokwim five years ago. We cannot administer properties that dissolve, literally, and so we joke that we all will have riverfront houses if we can only wait a few years. Still, we call it the same river, and we call ourselves the same people.
You have to go fishing, gather plants, look closely along the sides of rivers to see that what seems static is only moving a little slower that the river itself. Berry-picking is good around the old horseshoe sloughs left by rivers. We found most of our blueberries around the margins of old sloughs this summer, on the old riverbanks, and not so much back in the woods. I think it was too rainy for the tree-sheltered bushes to produce fruit—maybe that’s what happened, or it was something else? Too many variables make the overview difficult, so many details that there are only details, wonderful in profusion. Only when I’ve been out a few times does the shape of where the berries are this year come to me. They are looking for sun, clinging to the drier ground, hanging out over the open grass of ancient rivers.
Often when I am looking for berries, I can’t see them. I walk around in the berry patch for minutes, unsatisfied with the berries I see, unwilling to stop walking for just a few berries, then all of a sudden I can see enough berries, and I know they’ve been there all the time. It’s putting my back to the sun so the colors of bush and berries pull apart, but it’s something else too, something secretive about berries that won’t let you see them until you deserve it, until you’ve settled down, out of the future or past you’ve been thinking of and into the present moment where the berries are.
And when I close my eyes for a moment at the end of a day of picking berries, I see berries on bushes, lots of them and big. I never close my eyes and see berries in buckets or bags, ready for the freezer. It’s always berries still on bushes, etched with desire on my eye, and I relive finding and wanting them. They are like story cycles—their details fade with time, eventually leaving only forms and frames: emptiness and vanity, if you will. Berries are a gift of a moment when detail cannot be hidden in abstraction. In their moment I am privileged to be among them, their small dark roundness in my hand one at a time, or a lucky handful in the right season.
Stories are hidden in the river, as in they are in history, yet the parts are greater than the whole. They do not deaden, discourage, despair. They come into view and pass out of view, usually unfinished, and their details offer a vertical dimension to the flow. If I don’t look for names, search out the memory of particular people who have lived where I live, the forward movement of time erases definition and specifics, all the evidence of the deep vertical axis of my life. To avoid despair in the strong current of generations, I must uncover names, moments, old jokes I don’t understand. We have always been new things under the sun, each of us.
McGrath has been built at least three times. The first time, just after 1900, it was called McGrath after Peter McGrath, a U.S. Marshal, and it was up at the Forks, so called because that’s where the Nixon Fork runs into the Takotna River. That place was the farthest that boats from downriver could reliably travel toward the mining districts on the upper Takotna and the trailhead to Ophir on the Innoko River side. There was a warehouse at the Forks, owned by Archie Higgins from Takotna Village, and he had a gas boat that shoved a little barge up the Takotna River, but he had to wait until it rained so he could get his boat up over the shallow riffles.
After a few years, though, the boats that came upriver got bigger and the town had to move down to deeper water where the Takotna runs into the Kuskokwim. That’s where it was in 1917 when David Alvinza Ray, the wireless operator for the Army Corps of Engineers, fell off the tall wireless pole where he’d been repairing something and was killed. My friend Margaret, who has lived in one McGrath or another since 1929, told me about this wireless operator several times. When she arrived in McGrath, the story was polished but still fresh, told by many and connected in many directions across Alaska. Now she is its only storyteller, and in the version I heard her tell recently, the wireless operator had no name, only “the wireless operator who got killed.” The life of that story is nearly over, an empty frame.
But I know the wireless operator’s name because she used to know it and tell it and because the water was high enough this spring for us to get our riverboat over into Old Town Slough. The cabins have mostly been eaten up by mushrooms and rot and roses, but there’s an outhouse made from half of a round-hulled boat, green paint still clinging to it in patches, and David Alvinza Ray’s grave, with a small granite headstone. The grave still has a neat picket fence, though the white paint is all gone. This is about the only thing left of the second McGrath.
What would have been obvious about McGrath in the twenties and thirties would not have been David Ray or the outhouse made from half a boat but the big Northern Commercial Company warehouse and shipyard on the upstream side of where the Takotna ran into the Kusko. Margaret says there was a dog barn for travelers and mail carriers, big enough that you could drive your sled right through the middle of it. If you were the mail carrier, Carl Seseui coming in from Telida, you’d leave your sled in the barn all night and bed your twenty or so dogs down in the stalls on either side of the sled run. Every mail stop had a dog barn. You drove right up off the river and into it, Margaret said.
Old man Dan Sprague was a buffalo hunter from Montana who was a feature of the second McGrath. He had a homestead across the river, where the town is now, and he’d come over to what was then McGrath in the daytime with an unlit lantern so he could light his way home in the dark after an evening of poker. But the game would stretch into night and back into the short winter day before he’d whiskey-weave across the snow and back across the river to his home, lantern still unlit. In the summer, his farm was literally a one-horse operation. He’d borrow Vanderpool’s old white horse so he could plow his field. Vanderpool, the magistrate, lived one bend up the Kuskokwim, a mile and a half away, so they’d bring that horse up and down in a boat. Sometimes it wandered down through the woods on its own to be around people. When Margaret tells me about Dan Sprague, she often points to where his cabin used to be, a square of absent land off the end of the crosswind runway, long washed away by the shifting Kuskokwim. She said he was “a nice old man with long white whiskers” when she knew him in 1929.
The NC Company had to move their warehouse and store across to Sprague’s homestead in 1935, after the Takotna ate through its bank and into the Kuskokwim one bend above its old mouth, which silted in the very same summer and became too shallow for the steamboats. The rest of the town followed gradually, buying up lots from the NC Company. Now what you see when you look across the Kuskokwim from the boat slip is cutbank all the same height, but where the Takotna used to come out, the willows are a touch shorter, maybe thirty feet instead of thirty-five, and that’s how you know the river has hidden the channel and has hidden the town where the channel used to go. Rivers shift, and then towns drag their heels to new banks and wait to be washed away again.
Margaret has lived on both sides of the river because she came up to McGrath on the steamboat Tana in 1929. She saw the second town go down and the third one rise up. People and events flow through her talk so you can watch them, coming and going. We drink tea, couch and chair angled toward each other, and are surrounded by the hardware and mementos of a wilderness life, a river life. Nameplates from steamships, log tongs, lanterns. I am amazed by Margaret’s varied enterprises—her trapping, freighting, and cooking for mining crews—and by her stories of her father, the steamship captain. She knows a trick that turns canned milk into a caramel-tasting flavoring, but you have to use a stove with plates, not burners. I like the big garden she still grows in the deep river dirt of Dan Sprague’s old homestead and the delphiniums as big as blue trees above us when we sit outside in the summer. Margaret can’t remember if she or Dorothy Stone brought the first delphinium seeds to McGrath, but now they’re in every yard, and sometimes a stalk or two leans up out of the wild grasses and bedstraw along the road, invisible until it blooms.
Margaret helps me to resist the temptation to view my own life as a solid thing, just one kind of thing, or to get too far away from it, trying to see it. My mother would say, “It’s an angry river,” because in the experiences of her life, rivers do not have any specific dimension except for danger. If it is a flat, shiny river like the Snake, it’s hiding something. If it is swift and silty like the Kuskokwim, it’s angry. Its character, like its mood, seems to her an immutable fact. It’s easier to think about rivers and even whole people and whole lives in this way, never looking any closer, as if we all are just one thing, one kind of person, one kind of life. This kind of looking is a shorthand for being conscious, and I practice it incessantly. Although people are kind or cruel or smart or dumb one right after another, it seems like I know each of them, and myself, to be just one thing. When I think this way, there is no “give” to the way I treat others, no idea that we all could break through into another channel anytime, out the other end of even this moment, leaving expectations behind like a vestigial circle of slough.
I met Ted and Margaret in 1991 when an ice jam downriver brought the Kuskokwim out of its banks and through the town. We were renting one of the few houses that didn’t flood, though we had water over our top step, and we sat with our feet in it and handed out coffee and cake to people who were driving up and down the streets in their motorboats. Across the street, Margaret and Ted brought everything they could up out of their cellar and off the floor of their house and stored it in old barge containers up on blocks that looked to me like railroad cars. Then the two of them waded around in rising water, tying empty barrels together as a breakwater to keep all of the lumber and boxes and boats in their own yard—fifty years of stuff to try and keep from floating away. We hadn’t collected anything that needed saving, so I watched Ted and Margaret and the other neighbors struggle, wanting to help but not knowing how to grab ahold of anything.
All day, kids got canoes stuck in willow thickets. There was a breakup party at the Alaska Commercial Company boat slip in the afternoon. The ice was gone by then, even if the river wasn’t. We cooked hot dogs and hamburgers and drank beer and pop, standing in icy water and trying not to make waves that would wash over the top of our breakup boots. In the morning, when the water was going down, I took some hot biscuit cake out to the barge container where Ted and Margaret had found a dry place to sleep. The flood made us friends. I’ve been thankful, as I listen and grow close to them, as their lives open in stories I hope will last the winter.
After the water went down, people went into their houses and scraped out the inches of mud, peeled the carpets off the floors so the boards wouldn’t rot, and moved back in. Most of the kids were disappointed that the water went down so fast. They looked at their old town in a new way for a while because it had done something surprising.
Sometimes when you come down to McGrath, across the Kuskokwim from the Takotna mouth, it is a smooth mirror, and you see the little pointed tops of the AC store and warehouse reflected in the water. At the moment, the storefronts are dark green with big white signs and red letters. They peer at you across the runway because there were already airplanes landing at McGrath in 1935 when the town moved and the old NC Company built a runway in front of its store. Main Street runs alongside this old runway. The buildings along Main Street—the stores, the electric company, the café, the radio station, the FAA—all have to squint to see the river, but they do it. They are still curious to see who is coming across.
Details of our lives cross the flowing length everywhere. Each lived moment divides the current and makes the river new. Each story ties us up for a moment to another life and opens—briefly and out of time—a view of what we are to each other and to the earth. When I look across the glassy mouths of rivers, seams invisible, I want to go close to the bank so I can see who’s coming and who’s passing.
Draw up a chair with me on a nice day.