Let Us Now Praise Famous Rivers

During our recent trip through the deep South, my son and I noted that virtually every major city we visited had a river as its centerpiece.  Some of these waters were wide, muddy and with a barely perceptible flow, like the Mississippi at Memphis and New Orleans.  Others had been diverted by the hands of man and their course hemmed in and controlled by concrete, like the San Antonio.  Still others flowed along banks with high bluffs and bordering mountains but appeared as tame as a lake like the Tennessee River at Chattanooga.  However, none of these rivers we crossed during our 3300+ mile journey were like my home river, the James.

Boasting class III and IV rapids that flow through the city, the James provides the canvas upon which the history of our country was recorded.  Standing on the geologic fall line, the city provides the visual divide as the river shifts from flowing through the rocky piedmont to the wide coastal plain and eventually the bay and ocean.

For adventurers, fortune seekers and settlers, the rivers of the new world provided the first pathways for exploration into the interior of the unknown country.  Even today, that same feeling of mystery can be experienced as you consider the ability of water to swallow the tracks of a paddle and or wake of a motor and leave an undisturbed surface that appears as unchanged and new as it may have looked hundreds or even thousands of years ago.

This afternoon, I was treated to a boat ride on the river below the city and along its fall line.  It was in this wide, flat water that explorers founded settlements, settlers traded goods and made treaties, slavers unloaded and auctioned captured Africans and a President arrived victorious in his quest to reunite a nation.

In this quiet water, life abounds.... much of it blue.  Blue catfish, their size almost startling, swim silently along the bottom serving their role as apex predators of the deep.  Blue herons fish among the riffles bordering the small pockets of water hemmed in by the smooth river rock.  Even blue crabs, when drought causes the salinity to rise and water levels to drop, migrate their way west from the bay finding themselves among the crevices of sandstone and granite.

People also naturally migrate to rivers.  There is an deep seated, instinctual need to return to the resource that our ancestors based their survival upon.  However,  it is also a drowning river.  Every year, lives are lost either through drowning or suicide and unlike on land, evidence and explanations for these losses are erased quickly by the river's unending current.

Man can harness its flow for his own needs for a time, but eventually the river will continue to move in its natural, instinctive way.  It finds the ancient banks that it has cut into the landscape for millennia and follows them home to the sea.