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1 Chapter Defining the River It’s hard to get hold of a river. It invites the touch, but it’s difficult to grasp, an elusive thing that exists as much in the imagination as on the ground. Most times, a river knows its place, sticking to hollows it carves for itself in the earth. In high times, though, it wanders where it wants, with blind momentum and its own cadence. A river’s personality changes from day to day, sometimes shyly, sometimes with braggadocio. Some seasons, a river can be secretive and timid with a flow that struggles to cover its bed, eventually drying up on sun-baked rocks. Other times, when provoked, it can fill with thunder and fury. The definition of a river seems simple enough. It is flowing surface water of a size large enough to capture the imagination and have a name. Rivers share that ineffable magic of the way water forms and holds together, with hydrogen and oxygen atoms sharing each other’s electrons so they can become whole molecules. Then the molecules, which look like Mickey Mouse heads, link themselves together through the mutual attraction of two positively charged hydrogen ears bonding with an adjacent, negatively charged oxygen head to create a chain that has mass but no form. Somehow that definition misses its mark. To paraphrase Dylan Thomas, water may be composed of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, but there is something else. And no one knows what that is. A scientific description can’t explain the eloquence of a river or its complexity. The fact that a river is water only tells part of its story. A river is a child of gravity and wholly dependent upon it. It’s possible for water to climb uphill a short way via capillary attraction , but that momentary wandering is a fanciful conceit and not the unyielding path that a river must follow. Gravity is a stern arbiter . It allows only one way—down—and a river must take that route. A river bends in concert with the contours and opportunities of the land, but it is single minded in its goal. It’s instructive to think of a river as a medium. As gravity provokes it to move, it bears life’s debris in its currents. Because of a river’s intimate contact with land and its naturally erosive action, it carries geological sediments, those inorganic minerals that are the building blocks of new life. More importantly, a river carries with it the history of the land in its basin, as well as a deep time narrative 3 4 Bear River of the earth: rocks formed, then deformed, then formed again eons ago. They slowly move from a river’s source to its mouth, sometimes providing a cobbled bed for the stream, other times littering the floodplain. A river is life’s elixir, too. Along with minerals, a river carries organisms: bacteria and single-celled plants and animals that become the nutrients for successively higher-order animals. Moving water is a delivery system and incubator for aquatic life on land. It plenishes a community that extends inland beyond its banks to form a lotic or riparian ecology. A river is life’s refuse collector. Besides living organisms, it bears dead organic material. Leaves, twigs, and branches falling into or carried along a stream provide other nutrients for the lotic system. Plants drop seeds into the water to spread their life. Plants and animals evacuate their wastes into a river and make it fecund. The highest-order animal, homo sapiens, often uses a river to hide its garbage or, at least, move it downstream to the point where it isn’t a problem for the local community. Sometimes a river is not quite itself. Instead, we see it as a reflection of other beings or other moods. Then it is more lyrical than practical, more image than object. It can be a brilliant, specular reflection of the sun early or late in the day, a glaring ribbon that burns the retina. Other times, a river is an ethereal, deep blue as it reflects the heavens. If we move closer and choose a different angle, a river reflects life that crowds against its banks: willows, cottonwoods, or a deer slipping to its edge to drink under the cover of dusk. Sometimes, when dense fog forms above rivers where warmer water meets colder air, a river seems to disappear, blending into a gray union...

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