Drifting into Darien: A Personal and Natural History of the Altamaha River

Preface

Preface Me and you, river. The Altamaha is wide and made of molasses. It is a root doctor, gathering in her skirts alluvium and carrying these riches coastward to nurseries of shrimp and crabs. The river is a dark milk that feeds our young. Its mouth is full of baby birds. The river is holy scripture, on which is written a creed to live by. It is an uncertain certainty. Along the 137 miles of the river, woods crowd both sides, the banks free of houses and lawns, for the most part—a floodplain forest in which I sometimes see the spirit of my grandfather. It is a forest of old, water-loving trees: Water hickory. Reams of river birch, with its silver scaling bark and its modest, tongue-shaped leaves, scratching at the sky. Black willow, the mesh of it, the secret, the cinema. Magnolia. Tupelo, which I know to be hollow. My nephew Carlin looking through an open hole in a tupelo, saying, Like a home. The tree has pools of water in its bottom. Even a bath, he says. I remember loggers who chainsawed a hole in a tupelo so they could throw their cans and food wrappers inside and then replaced the block of wood to hide their mess. Imagine coming through this floodplain and discovering a trap door, what you would feel when you looked inside. A tupelo doubling as a Dumpster. A river doubling as a pipeline. Swamp chestnut oak. Cypress, tall and proud. x preface The Altamaha is a green sward, a mighty symphony of trees, an endless congress, broken only by a few bridges and trestles, a paper mill, a nuclear plant, and some effluent pipes. The river is a contradiction , breached and unbroken, nourishing and destructive, tame and wild. The river is the same as it has been for centuries—for twenty million years—and yet it changes—another contradiction. It has two movements. One of them is geologic, a bend deepened, an oxbow forged, a bank undercut until water bursts through and forms a rushing strait. The river’s other movement is current time, thousands of gallons a second rushing endlessly from the Appalachian foothills through the piedmont through the coastal plains to the sea. Other rivers are as wide, and as dark, and as long, and as deep, and as bendy. Others are as well loved. Others are as wild. The world is full of lively, flowing, storied rivers asking nothing, intent on their missions. Rivers both merciless and merciful. But the Altamaha is mine, its water my blood, its history my own. I was born of it. Every drop of water I have drunk in my sojourns along it has come from it and returns to it. Thus the river informs me, as I inform it. This river is a library, full of biota. In these stacks, everything is written in different languages. There is a dialect for motions at the surface of water, ripples and waves and minivolcanoes and sometimes only a shimmering of wind. Each species has its own vernacular , rasps and howls and bellows and flutelike songs. Fish have a lingo of puff and plop, and wild speech falls off the tongues of amphibians and reptiles. There is also a language beyond sound. In this library, one shelf is for mussels and one is for bream that live in submerged bank roots. There is a cabinet for the life of canopies and a dictionary of grass. This library contains a reference for butterflies, a catalogue of birds. It offers a concordance of arthropods, a circulation of seeds. xi preface The river runs and runs. It runs until it makes a circle, half in the sky, and finds itself again. It runs not simply to haul rainfall out of Georgia. Not only to water the land. Nor only to nourish these forests. Nor only because it is a storehouse of life. The river runs because it is the keeper of mystery. It is the bearer of what cannot be humanly borne. It is the course of transformation. It is a sacred urn that, once opened, changes everything. Champion of happiness, the Altamaha is large enough to hold all joy. Creator of sorrow, it also sweeps away grief. Cradle, it rocks us into being. It is the unraveled cord of love, its tendrils reaching everywhere , finally undoing all evil. Enter its intelligence, its love, its...