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Foreword
- University of Iowa Press
- Chapter
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Foreword | Wayne Franklin Water floats memories. Think of any phase in your experience and soon you will find some stream twisting through your thoughts. Irememberverywell,forexample,thefirsttimeIsawtheGrandCanyon. ItwasinJune1970,fortyyearsagonow.IhaddrivennorthfromPhoenixin a crippled VW bus and, after managing to locate a repair shop in Flagstaff, got back on the road and headed north again for the last few miles. ThelandscapemostofthewayfromCaliforniahadbeen bleakand dry, with the sort of razor-edge beauty that only the early summer desert can attain. I had visited Sequoia National Park, but the drive since then had dried out my damp, green impressions of that place. Once past Barstow, I was launched on the real desert, and water was only a memory. So when I got up the first morning at the Grand Canyon, left the campground , and drove to the South Rim, the idea that I could hike down to confront the Colorado River was irresistibly enticing. With a full canteen and a little food, a snakebite kit, and a few other essentials, I found Bright AngelTrailandbegandescending.Afteralongperiodofzigzaggingwonderment , with fresh views at every turn, the trail straightened, stretching out overthehotplateau.Bylunchtime,IhadarrivedatIndianGarden,situated where a little mirage of cottonwoods had been growing and growing like a greenspotinmysweatyeyesforsometime.Thereactuallywaswaterthere, and shade. After that pause I went on my way, not out to Plateau Point, where I could have looked down at the still distant river and returned to the rim in good time, but rather farther and farther on. I went along the mule trail, which follows the route of Garden Creek before it passes into the channel that flows from Pipe Spring down to the Colorado. There was plenty of viii | Foreword evidence of water along this route: in the greenery that, sparse as it was, nonethelessoutdidanythingIhadbeenseeingfordays;intherockformations themselves, which bespoke the force with which both wind and rain had been at work for longer than I cared to think; and then in the trickling flowfromPipeSpring.Soon,Idiscernedwater’spresence inan evenmore dramatic way, for the sound of thunder rumbled among the pagan temple formsthattheEuro‑Americanimagination,seekingsomewaytonameand controlthesheerenergyofthisplace,hasconjuredupintheinnercanyon. As I came around a bend, the sound became more than sound, for I was looking down on a thunderstorm as it made its way eastward above the still-invisible Colorado. Lightning flashed; thunder roared and rumbled, dying away amid rocks older by many millennia than Rome or Egypt or China. Perhaps I had looked down into a thunderstorm while airborne at someearliertimeinmylife,butseeingthisonefarbelowmeinthecanyon whilemyfeetrestedonthedustyearthandrockstoweredabovemecreated a rich feeling for the improbable structure of this desert world. Before too long, I was down at the edge of the Colorado, where I was struck by the forceandsizeofthedeepgreenriverasitcutitswaythroughthedark,hard gneiss and schist of the canyon walls. Everything here seemed to wear the color of the deep earth. As to the river: I could not cross it or even safely wade into it. So I stood and then sat, staring as its sound flooded my brain and the daylight, lost far above in the canyon, retreated into the sky. I had learnedlessons,deeplessons,intheponderousrealityofwater.Foratime, thesillypretentiousnessofthosecanyontemplesdisappearedandIthought only about the spiritual actuality of the river. Memories such as these have continued to flow in my mind long after the outer images that they refer to have faded and then disappeared. Scott McMillin revives them for me in The Meaning of Rivers. His effort is both ambitious and disarmingly simple. He wants, as his title suggests, to set us thinking not about the surface of rivers, whether smooth and shiny or turbidandrough,butratherabouttheirphilosophicalsignificance.“What do rivers mean?” he insists on asking us at the outset, and he will not let us offeasy.Wecannotreplythatriversareabouttheendlessflowofexperience, or that they mirror the fluid uncertainty of our souls—such clichés will not do. For one thing, he conceives of rivers in their intransigentthereness, Foreword | ix theiractuality.Ifriversaretomeansomething,itwillnotbebecausewecan forget actual flows of water, with the debris they carry and the work they do. It is because we remember their material reality that we will earn the right to ask the deeper questions he wants us to consider. McMillin therefore situates us at the outset on a bluff above that quintessential American river, the Mississippi. Itistooeasyforhumanists,whodonotoftenhavetodealwithmaterial reality, to speak in vague generalities. This is the point at which McMillin’s simplicitydisarmsareader.Havingaskedthebigquestions,hebuildsanswers to them by patiently boxing the compass of fluvial writing. It is striking to think that the perspectival array he proposes, with its prepositional modesty , might just unlock a set of precious secrets. But that is what it does. The vector of a particular imaginative approach to...