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116 & 22. Shadblow we’re heading upriver on the green silky water of a ghost river. We don’t know it as we chug northwest in our motored barge, but near the shore in the shallow water of the Schuylkill there’s a body floating. I’m thinking about all the boats that were here when the Bartrams lived on their farm.All the commerce and activity that churned up the shallow waters. Now it’s as if we’re on a wilderness trip, slowly making our way past the broken spires of mountains and the clogged hearts of rivers and bays. But we’re traveling instead through the years on the river,past rotting pilings,iron structures for trains and power plants,an old motel perched on the very edge of the west bank where men lean out of windows and shout at us as we head back down the river. Our captain takes us to the waterworks below the art museum. They’re on the edge of the river, too, the miniature buildings from the early 1800s newly painted with a creamy yellow that stands out against the cliff behind them, the first spine of the Piedmont, lifting itself up from the coastal plain. Graham and Scott lean out over the prow of the square barge. I bend to look straight ahead into the future. Our guide is telling us that soon there’ll be a dock at Bartram’s garden, soon these trips will be commonplace.Now,we’re the only boat on the lower river.Fishermen and young boys with sticks wave at us from the east bank. We pass a goose on a nest in the splinters of railroad ties. All the new leaves of the trees and bushes of the riverbank shimmer in the early-afternoon light, chilled and expectant. The air is sweet on the river—spring—smelling of blooming.Cormorants and geese and crows and seagulls fly up or down as we circle to the fall line and shadblow 117 back. In the bushes by Bartrams’field I see the flash of an oriole and hear a cardinal whistling his territory. Maybe there’s a kingfisher chattering there, too. A man in a bow tie and a straw hat has come for the ride. And a woman who takes notes for the newspaper, her arm wrapped around the large arm of her companion, a man with glinting chains around his neck. “I’ll be sure to put all this in the piece,” she says to Bill LeFevre, the director of Bartram’s Garden. We could be anywhere but here on the river in the city.I’m sipping wine. I’m thinking about Ann Bartram and her wagon crossing the floating bridge that’s no longer here at Grays Ferry,taking her butter to market. ...

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