The lure of rivers is both personal and possessive. The magic for each person is different. The possession of each person by a river also is different, for the rivers, and not the persons lured by them, do the possessing.

    Love for the rivers is more than being a "water person." A water person is one who craves to be near any body of water whether river, lake, ocean or creek. A water person likes best the things that can be done in or on water such as sailing or swimming. Although all water persons are lured by rivers, not all for whom the rivers hold magic are water persons.

     Those for whom the rivers are special, whether or not they are water persons, find that each river holds its own magic and that some hold more magic than others.

     In my own case, for example, the lure of the Thames differs both in kind and in magnitude from the lure of the Mississippi.

     The Thames bordered my life for over a year. Thus, I was able to be possessed by it constantly. It fed the dreams of my future and watered the knowledge of my past while giving me great pleasure in the present. During that year, whenever it was possible to go anywhere on the Thames, that was how I went. I also spent hours by it going nowhere, just watching its movement and the movement of other things on it. It mesmerized and comforted me with its continual and incessant lapping at the feet of ongoing time. I sailed often to meet it by way of Brightlingsea. One of the more breathtaking encounters between the Thames and me took place on Guy Fawkes night when the inky black of the river shimmered with the bursting reflections from enormous bonfires along its banks.

     The Mississippi is warp and woof of my own little individual history as my own river, the Ohio, empties into it. As a child, I learned it was called the "Father of Waters." I did not see the Mississippi until I was an adult and had long since been possessed in varying degrees by such rivers as the Licking, Seine, Zambezi, Rhine and Los Angeles (yes, Los Angeles River), among others. I made the acquaintance of the Mississippi in a predawn New Orleans October mist while sitting on some pilings with a French Quarter friend who had been born and reared in the bayou country.

     I could hear the swish plop of the river's breathing long before the rising sun enabled me to glimpse its face. Its rolling might was clothed with serenity just as is clothed the greatness of all things and persons who know what they are about. I was near paralyzed with wonder as I thought of all the lives it had touched in its flowing. The hopes and dreams of those carried to it by the Ohio alone included those carried and emptied into the Ohio at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, by the Allegheny and the Monongahela Rivers.

     The principal river of my nation, the Mississippi possessed me with its weave of long ago drumbeats, not so long ago bitter slave tears and the ensuing Civil War blood of brother drawn by brother, all overlaid with the frosting of Gershwin, and the present low-paid efforts of New Orleans black and white workers alike who now could be seen, with the aid of a red sun glowing, against the disappearing night shadows.

     Different from these two rivers and different from each other are all those rivers to which I belong.

     Respect was my response to the lure of the Rhine, historically known as the waterway of Europe. German immigrants creating my own city of Cincinnati, Ohio, continued to be bound by the pull of their Old World umbilical river. They therefore and naturally named the canal for it that flowed through the then-center of their New World achievement. That Rhine Canal has long been covered over and the resultant much-used thoroughfare today is called Central Parkway. This bit of remembered history surfaced so strongly when I encountered the Rhine in the homeland of those immigrants that the river itself touched only my mind and not my soul.

     With this touching that would not leave me, and as I moved along on the river itself, I felt the chill of those persons who stayed and became part of the modern history of their nation. The feeling was that of an iced rod of iron where my backbone should be, and a dampening mist of failed illusion clinging to my eyebrows. So great and so determined a people they were, both those who stayed and those who left. I wondered how anyone could leave such natural beauty; I marveled at the tenacity of so high a hope and belief that such a lifeline as the Rhine could be invoked by a canal of the same name. I could not imagine the Rhine maidens of Wagner lore even visiting, much less singing, in the now covered-over Rhine Canal of my home town.

     Since my sojourn alongside and on the Rhine, it ecologically has died and been reborn. The result is a marine resurrection signified by the celebrated return of salmon and several classes of algae among other long-absent Rhine dwellers.

     The Zambezi, running through what was once Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, skirts such wonders as Victoria Falls and its attendant rain forest. It is a river of pure emotion, equating passionate life with passionate love in a land and continent of extremes that know no moderation.

     The Zambezi does not invite you to sit and watch; it lures you to be and do. It is a body of flowing surprises. One time as I was calmly borne on its back in a small boat, thrilling to the multi-green brigade that was Africa marching along on both sides of the river, there suddenly came a big jolt. When the boat again steadied, I looked back and saw, breaking the surface of the river, a yawning hippo, probably jarred awake by the passing of the boat over him. In reality that yawn was a message from the disappearing Africa that said: "Walk softly, man, for you are only a visitor here."

     The Zambezi, like its continent, possesses its visitor with an elemental, near all-consuming embrace. You can not be as small in mind, heart or soul as you were before you loved it. It, more than any river I have known, has a "foreverness" that speaks of past, present and future as one, saying for all three, "it is."

     The Nile is the African river of choice for many, but, unlike the Zambezi, its lure is passionless. There is so much 'long ago and far away' flowing with it that even a face-lift like the Aswan Dam cannot erase a visage that is both old and decrepit, and smooth and sardonic. It calls forth many images connected with itself such as Isis and Osiris, Moses and the plagues visited upon the Egyptians, the alleged parting of the Red Sea, and the more modern and up-to-date Suez Canal fights both with Europe and Israel, for example. It itself is lost in these images and if the images were not burdening enough, there are the things on land that both physically and emotionally overshadow it as do the pyramids and the Sphinx.

     The Seine, which, when the day has gone, reflects the glory of a light-emblazoned Paris, is a sensible and somewhat world-weary river. The Seine has seen it all: Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, the squabbling popes, the Black Death, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the last of the big time spenders a la Louis XIV, Madame DeFarge and Robespierre, and the Corsican adventurer Napoleon, to list but a few of what we call cataclysmic happenings and personalities which, unlike the Seine itself, have been swallowed up in time. It has survived a collapsed Maginot Line and the vital-to-France but nonetheless often egotistic puffery of General Charles DeGalle. It no doubt also will survive the squatter's rights of the fast-food joint, MacDonald's, on the Champs Elysees.

     To sit on the left bank of the Seine and dangle your feet in the water is to ease your heart and allay any fears of the time that is and the time that is to come. All things pass, as the Seine passes. The Seine knows this, and to know the Seine is to know this. The greatest lure of the Seine is its calm, continual passing.

     The Sambre and the Meuse Rivers come together at Namur in Belgium where up high and overlooking their juncture is a citadel. Reached by a very winding road, this fortress of 2000 years of uninterrupted history (besieged twenty times in twenty centuries) is the best place for viewing the confluence of the Meuse and Sambre Rivers and their valleys.

     These rivers themselves have played their own parts in history. The Meuse historically perhaps is the better known to Americans, particularly those who are scholars and aficionados of both world wars. These rivers seem always to be spoken of together, so much so that it almost appears in conversation as if they were one. As example, today on an internet site I picked up the following: "... A cruise on the Sambre and Meuse ..." If I didn't know better from being lured by both rivers some time back, I would think it to be a name like that of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad which was indeed one railroad and not two separate entities.

     The lure for me of each river was and is an individual one, the singular pull of a separate chapter in the record of history. I ambled constantly along the Meuse where many in houseboats had made their homes, taking from the river its constancy as foundation for their own lives.

     Walking along the Sambre (and you walked there with purpose; ambling did not seem suitable) showed sole involvement with a commercial present complete with warehouses and government buildings. These two rivers may be inseparable in the minds of many and in the teaching of history, yet they are separate and distinct in their lure. Together they present back-to-back pages in the Book of Man in that part of the planet, noting his solid Then, and eager, forward-looking Now.

     The most foreign of rivers that have lured me is not in a foreign country but in my own. I describe the Los Angeles River as "foreign" because most of the time it is waterless and some say it no longer should be called a river. Yet I have walked its dry bed and faintly felt its lure of now-suppressed tossed-around excitement smelling of gold and oil, tinsel and truth.

     Several times, too, I have seen a few inches of water in its bed, (and sadly today in this winter of 1998, it indeed is full of water, compliments of El Nino). It was, and always will be, a river to me, dry bed or not, and it sings its special lure as all rivers do, if one will but listen. One night, defending the river as river, I closed my argument by noting that Los Angeles, California, is like no other place on this earth; therefore, why should its river be like any other river on this earth?

     Shared with California by its neighboring state Nevada is the Truckee River. This river may pose as the best example of my conviction that the lure of a river is different for each person; in fact, the lure of a river is received as a very singular message by each who hears and responds to it.

     I, for one, find the Truckee to be amusing and I cannot really take it seriously. Every time I've gone near it I think of and look for only one thing: the Truckee duckees (duckies). The concern with the ducks on the Truckee was major with an early Western acquaintance of mine and my relationship with the Truckee remains colored by that memory. Others I know hear music in their heads when someone says "the Truckee" because their relationship with the river is attendance at the noontime concerts by the Reno Municipal Band.

     There are various sites in Washoe County (Nevada) along the Truckee where one can sit and daydream or eat lunch or just watch the Truckee. Most persons with whom I've shared these things invariably see the Truckee as a reminder of wonderful river days in their childhood home towns. Perhaps that is the greatest lure of the Truckee: the calling up of memories with which it itself has no real connection.

     There are many in Nevada who do not know from where the Truckee comes (it is formed by and is the only outlet for Lake Tahoe, a body of water also shared by California and Nevada; it begins in Tahoe City, California). There are many in California who do not know where the Truckee goes (it flows east through the Truckee Meadows and drains into Pyramid Lake, a desert lake located 32 miles northwest of Reno, Nevada). Even 'though water is king in the West, there are many in both of these states who are lured by things other than rivers. One could say that rivers as such are 'foreign' to these individuals.

     Not at all foreign to me in any sense, of course, is the Missouri River which empties into the great Mississippi at St. Louis, Missouri. Years before I ever saw the Missouri, I sung constantly about it during performances in South Africa with a song called "Shenandoah." The Missouri is a repository of the innocent, generous, rollicking, striving events that signatured America when America was young. Some years ago in my print journalism days, on the Kansas side of the river, traveling on a summer night, the car headlights picked out a barefoot, blue-jeaned boy meandering on the dusty road underneath enormous, all-embracing, silently-gesturing heavily-green-ladened trees.

     Through the open car windows, the smell of one's midwestern childhood, one's own long ago, was in the air, and by it all flowed the wide Missouri. Stopping the car, getting out and walking down the bank, submitting to the lure of that river, the heart was grateful, although it wept, for both an individual and a national past that river-rolled star-spangled and headlight-spotted and then disappeared before one's eyes.

     Least foreign to me of all is my own river, the Ohio. It is the one with whom my relationship continually grows and changes. Always I have belonged to it. The bond, however, was not always as strong as it has become. It is only now that I have been lured by the rivers of the world that I, older now too, can take the comfort and beauty offered to me by my own, and my own, often to my surprise, truly is beautiful.

     I have spent much time on my Ohio River and many hours by it. I have seen it with its rose-red sun-spun morning blanket and I have seen it moon-splashed and star-mirrored. I have seen it sable black in winter with a white ice-chipped collar. I have seen it mud-ruffled in spring with black barge stripes. I have watched the hills that guard it and have heard in my heart the running feet of my ancestors, the Miami Indians, along its banks. I have sailed under its bridges and been raised by its locks and dams. I have known the pleasure it brings and I have long pondered, attempting to guess, the secrets it keeps. Its lure grows greater for me as I grow older because it is my own.

©1998 Marilyn Guswiler


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