The World, The Word, and the Inevitable Beauty of Change: An Interview with Alison Hawthorne Deming

Alison Hawthorne Deming was born in 1946 in Hartford, Connecticut, and spent much of her early life in New England. She is the author of Science and Other Poems (LSU Press, 1994), selected by Gerald Stern for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. The book was listed in the Washington Post’s Favorite Books of 1994 and was named as one of the Bloomsbury Review’s best poetry books of the past fifteen years. She is the author of three additional poetry books, The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence (Louisiana State University Press, 1997), Genius Loci (Penguin, 2005), and Rope (Penguin, 2009). Deming has also published three nonfiction books, Temporary Homelands (Mercury House, 1994; Picador USA, 1996); The Edges of the Civilized World (Picador USA, 1998), a finalist for the PEN Center West Award; and Writing the Sacred into the Real (Milkweed Editions, 2001). She edited Poetry of the American West: A Columbia Anthology (Columbia University Press, 1996) and co-edited with Lauret E. Savoy The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural World, now reissued in an expanded edition (Milkweed, 2002 and 2011). Her small press works include two limited edition chapbooks, Girls in the Jungle: What Does It Take for a Woman to Survive as an Artist? (Kore Press, 1995) and Anatomy of Desire: The Daughter/Mother Sessions (Kore Press, 2000), a collaboration with her daughter, the artist Lucinda Bliss. Deming received an MFA from Vermont College in 1983 and held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University from 1987 to 1988.

Her writing has won two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and the Tucson/Pima Arts Council; a Residency Award from the National Writer’s Voice Project; the Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod; the Pushcart Prize; the Gertrude B. Claytor Award from the Poetry Society of America; and the Bayer Award in science writing from Creative Nonfiction for the essay “Poetry and Science: A View from the Divide.” She has held residencies at Yaddo; Cummington Community for the Arts; the Djerassi Foundation; Mesa Refuge; the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology; the Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska; Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers in Scotland; and the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest. She has served on the faculty of the Prague Summer Seminars, Writers at Work, Taos Summer Writers’ Conference, Art of the Wild, the Orion Society’s Forgotten Language Tour, the Sitka Symposium on Human Values and the Written Word, and numerous other writing programs. In 1997 she was Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai’i in Mānoa. Her poems and essays have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including Orion, The Pushcart Prize XVIII: Best of the Small Presses, American Nature Writing, and The Norton Book of Nature Writing. Currently she is professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona and lives near Aqua Caliente Hill in Tucson.

td:

Because place figures so prominently in your writing and thinking, why don’t you begin by telling us where you are at the moment?

ahd:

I’m up in the Bay of Fundy on Grand Manan Island waiting for Hurricane Irene. The sky has been an eerie gray white this morning and now the fog is coming to shore as the rain begins to pelt. The storm won’t fully hit until tonight, so a day lies ahead of rain and wind and anxiety. I’m sitting in a cottage built in 1864 and wondering what it has weathered. Surely many dangerous intensities. I don’t know whether the anxiety I feel about the storm comes from the news or from an archaic intuition that something dangerous is nearby. The fishermen brought all the boats into the wharf yesterday and lashed them up to each other with bow and stern and spring lines and then some. Many took the twine off their herring weirs. This is a pragmatic place where caution is taken to heart, not with cynicism or irony, but with clear-cut tasks. It’s one of the qualities I love about the island. I figure I’d best reply to your first questions before the power goes out.

td:

As has been recounted in other interviews with you and in the fine biographical portrait by Scott Slovic, which is included in Writing the Sacred into the Real, much of the early part of your life was devoted to administrative work in public health in New England, specifically in Vermont and Maine. How were you connected to the arts, especially poetry, during these years? What did art mean to you in these settings and has that relationship changed over the years as you moved into the academy to teach creative writing?

ahd:

Art has always been my primary relationship. During those years of working in women’s health care, I was writing and reading, sharing work with a few friends who wrote. One of the transformational books I read in those years was Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred. From it I began to consider what it might mean for poetry to be a voice that speaks from a collective sense rather than an individualistic one. I found a broader range of what poetry had been and could be in the world than what I had learned as a student of American and English poetry. These latter were my first loves, so to speak, in literature. But the infusion of tribal poetries was sobering and inspiring to me. It’s interesting to me now that I was at the time engaged in a job that served the social good, so perhaps I can say that I was growing up into a sense of obligation not only to my self but to my time. I became involved in those years with the Poets Mimeo Coop in Burlington, Vermont, and they turned me on to the Black Mountain and San Francisco Renaissance poets. So a great deal of my poetic education was taking place for a decade or more in non-academic settings. I think this is true for many poets. First comes the insatiable appetite for poetry. I was always connected, as I have been since childhood, with other arts. Playing piano, singing in a madrigal group, for some years doing modern dance, et cetera. So I don’t think my relationship with art has changed, or the inner domain, at all over these years. I’ve always felt that I had a strange obligation to life, that art was a way of giving back a spiritual good in return for the amazing privilege of having a life.

td:

Having grown up in Connecticut and spent much of your adult life— well into your forties—in New England, what did you experience when you moved to Arizona to run the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center and later to teach at the University of Arizona? Did your relationship to or understanding of the natural world change with this move?

ahd:

Moving to the Sonoran Desert was humbling for me as a naturalist from the Northeast. I had to learn the names of plants and animals in my backyard, relearn what I knew about seasonal patterns (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” loses its romantic force at 110 degrees), rethink American history from deeply Latino and Native perspectives, and accept scorpions as occasional cohabitants. And the scale shift in moving from a cozy forested landscape of New England to one in which the sky and land were vast and exposed was intimidating. I quickly grew to appreciate the adaptive strategies that plants and animals develop to make use of arid habitat. I like to think my imagination expanded in response to the scale shift, that the move made me more elastic in how I conceived of nature and my place in it. It made me want to take on one of the pieties of nature writing—that one should stay in a place and answer to it and for it in order to be intimate with nature. I’m still very keenly tuned to the bioregion of my origins, but I’ve taken seriously the obligation that comes with being a newcomer to treat my surroundings with respect. As a citizen of a fiercely mobile society, I’m interested in exploring how people can develop intimacy with places that are new to them, as the Southwest was to me twenty years ago.

td:

Virtually all your work is focused upon the natural world and is often anthologized in books devoted to nature writing. Are you comfortable with the moniker nature writer? What does such a title mean to you as a writer? In other words, what do you try to impart to your students about “nature writing”?

ahd:

I didn’t really plan to be a nature writer. I write poems and essays, and my issues as a writer are aesthetic ones of form, voice, intention. But my issues as a citizen are with the diminishment of the earth at human hands, at the wasting of bounty for the sake of trivial or avaricious pursuits, at injustice in all its garish garb. So these two impulses, as writer and citizen, come together often for me at the desk. My passion for the plight of nature is metonymic for my passion for the plight of each one of us as mortal creatures. In the long view, I think it’s an honor to be called a nature writer, though often the phrase is intoned with a snide arrogance by those who feel that art should be about irreverence to the dominant paradigms. The reverence of nature writing drives them nuts. Fine. This is a rich tradition, one that asks a writer to engage art, philosophy, and science in a dynamic conversation. For me, nature provides a secular path to religious feeling. Writing with my feet on the ground of nature and place helps me to stitch together science and lyricism as ways of knowing.

I often use The Norton Book of Nature Writing with undergraduate creative nonfiction students in order to teach them to look outward for their subject matter, to practice keen observation of nature and place, and to speculate about the larger questions. I always have them read some of the early naturalists—I’m especially fond of George Catlin’s account of the American bison as a primer to writing scene and description. I also love to teach Ellen Meloy’s essay “The Flora and Fauna of Las Vegas” for an urban and comic take on what the genre can do. And, speaking of Las Vegas, certainly John D’Agata’s About a Mountain is a terrific book to use for writers interested in new forms of nonfiction. With graduate students, I work to impress upon them that their personal stories take on valence when they are set within a cultural context. It’s impossible to be awake in the early twenty-first century without being aware that environmental crisis and related social justice issues are our context and likely to remain so for the next several generations. How this will influence their art is to be determined. But not to have it enter the work in some fashion would be like Montaigne not bothering to mention the plague. (I’ve spoken here about nonfiction because I’ve mostly taught in this genre in recent years.)

td:

How do you perceive the relationship between nature and art? In other words, how does nature allow or help you to create your art, and how does your art shape your perception or deepen your understanding of nature?

ahd:

Speaking metaphysically, nature and art are synonymous. The same imperative in nature—the principle of emergence that makes things come into form—is at play in the mind as a desire to make things come into form. So I see any art making as a way to engage with a natural process that’s embedded in us—what Gary Snyder calls “wild mind.” Galaxies, dandelions, pantoums, riffs, and refrains. All the patterning impulses are expressions of emergence. So for starters nature makes it possible for me to make art. In another sense art is an act of resistance against nature, it’s the anti-entropy impulse. Art refuses to let energy dissipate. It corrals energy into a form that stands up against dissolution.

More pragmatically, I’ve felt since I was a child astonished by nature, all the creatures and interrelationships, the beauty and terror of it. And I’ve been in a perpetual state of disbelief at the diminishment of nature at human hands. I feel I owe it something in return for the gift of life. So I write and try to hold in a poem or essay some of the feeling for the world that nourishes my inner life. I also write in order to see more clearly, to learn more deeply about the complexity of it all and how it works. So I will often do research for a poem or essay, and I’m especially jazzed by the biological sciences and what they have to teach me. I’m looking for the lyrical details that are hiding in the empirical. I want both ways of seeing. I’m sick of feeling I have a divided mind that must either think or feel. I’m trying to make them one in the practice of writing. Most simply, experiences in nature make me want to write. So I go outside to look for my material.

There’s no question for me that writing essays and poems sharpens my perception of nature. I look with greater attention, I ask questions to dig into a subject, I follow associations to see if there’s a metaphoric valence that’s made me feel drawn to a subject. What’s going on in my psyche that makes, for example, the reproductive story of the Leach’s storm petrel so compelling to me, as it was this summer when I visited their nesting burrows on Kent Island with researchers working there? By telling its story, I’m tracing, by suggestion, the shape of an inner conflict about my hopes for the future, my grief over recent losses. So the writing makes me learn more about how the world works and how one human mind works, and hopefully that becomes a kind of salve for others in a painful time.

td:

A follow-up to the last question: What spiritual or philosophical traditions inform your understanding of this idea of emergence, and how does religion or spirituality play a role in the creation of your art?

ahd:

I got onto the idea of emergence when I heard cell biologist Ursula Goodenough speak and then I read her book The Sacred Depths of Nature. She lays out the territory of a religious naturalism based upon “the epic of evolution” and the phenomenon of emergence that runs all the way from the Big Bang to what’s going on in my mind as I write this. She’s developed precepts for this view—the “credo of continuation” and “covenant of mystery,” et cetera. Stuart Kaufman’s work Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion is another source. Their thinking appeals to me because it is resonant with my experience of nature: that it is the source of my feeling for the sacred, my reverence, my devotion—and ultimately submission, which is an aspect of the religious experience and of our mortal condition. I’m interested in finding a secular language for these feelings and beliefs.

I was not raised within a religious tradition. At age ten I joined the Congregational Church because a girlfriend wanted me to sing duets with her in the choir. I had to take Sunday School classes and get baptized before I could join the choir, which I did. I’m sure there was a religious hunger buried in my motives at that time. I loved the ritual of the church service, the beauty of the sanctuary with its grand burgundy velvet drapes and music filling its bones, and the biblical lessons about how one should live. But I considered myself an outsider to the faith, then as now. I’ve studied Eastern religions, practiced meditation, consulted the I Ching, and sought religious view in Native song and ritual. Now I see a Jungian analyst as a key element in my spiritual quest. So I guess you could say I am a hybridizer, though I am not a member or follower of any organized religion.

td:

In your most recent book of poems, Rope, you have a long poem, or sequence of poems, called “The Andrews Forest Quintet.” In your poetry and prose, you have explored regions or places that you are visiting, that you have not lived in for a long period of time. Can you talk about your experience at the Andrews Forest a bit and then explain how you do this kind of “travel writing”? What can you bring to this kind of writing that is different from the writer who may have lived in the same location for her entire life?

ahd:

The poems from the Andrews Forest were written during several visits to this Long Term Ecological Research site in Oregon. It is one of twenty-some LTER sites funded by the National Science Foundation, mostly in the United States. Fred Swanson and Kathy Moore, earth scientist and philosopher at Oregon State University, have developed a companion program called Long Term Ecological Reflections. They invite writers to visit the research site and contribute work to their Forest Log. One of the keystone projects here is a log-decomposition study that has a two-hundred-year time horizon. That’s because it will take two hundred years for giant Douglas fir logs to rot back into the forest floor and there is a lot that can be learned in that time about the ecological role of the decomposition. The Reflections component also has a two-hundred-year time horizon. An archive of literary and philosophical work is being built side by side with the scientific findings. Poetry is seen as a means of apprehending the forest that is equally valuable to science. Some of the writers who’ve come were familiar with the region. Some are less so. But the whole point here is to see through new eyes and give new language to the experience of the place in order to better understand and communicate what it has to teach us. This type of project is expanding to other sites around the country. This is happening in part because many scientists working on environmental issues understand that they haven’t been very successful in communicating with the public about the sustainability challenges that are upon us.

Well, that’s a long digression, but I think it’s important to talk about these new kinds of interdisciplinary collaborations that are very exciting. So I prepared for my time at the Andrews by reading some of the research papers that have come out of the site in recent years, by going out into the field with researchers, and by using maps and field guides to get language and grounding. I had the chance to spend time in the forest with the head of the northern spotted owl research team, which was a great experience and one that allowed me to write about the research in the form of telling the story of our outing. I take a lot of notes in the field—sensory data. And I ask myself what might I be seeing differently because I’m new to this place and what might I be missing because I’m new to this place? And I try to answer those questions as best I can.

The last poem in that sequence was “This Ground Made of Trees.” I wrote it at the log-decomposition site, which ecologists have spoken of as a site for studying “morticulture,” as opposed to horticulture. While lying on a gigantic, dead, moss-covered tree trunk, I tried to imagine dying into that peaceful place. After I had written the poem, it seemed to me that I had written it for my mother, who is now 101 years old and doesn’t want to live any longer. Nonetheless, she continues. Fred Swanson said that I had taken some grief counseling from the forest.

td:

You mentioned in an earlier response that there is a desire for “form.” In Rope, you have two long poems that take radically different forms: “Works and Days” and “The Flight.” “Works and Days” is a poem in forty-five prose poem sections, while “The Flight” is composed of ninety-three staggered sestets. How did these poems take on these forms, and how do these forms help shape the images and ideas these poems move toward? (I’m also thinking here of the radical formal diversity in your long poem “Genius Loci,” from Genius Loci.)

ahd:

“The Flight” seemed to require from its earliest gestures that I resist the left margin, the lines themselves impelled to fly as I considered the phenomenon of flight in a range of contexts. So I thought of William Carlos Williams and his triadic line and developed a doubling of that into the rightward fleeing sestets. I needed the regularity of stanzaic form to hold the rangy nature of the poem into some pattern of order and shapeliness.

“Works and Days” came out of that anxiety about the line that all poets, I think, suffer from time to time. What is the line? Why is the line? How is it? So I wanted to abandon the line and work with the compression of the prose poem. This form seemed to suit the source of these pieces—journal entries that I didn’t want to let fall into the oblivion of the journal but ones that offered language or images or reflection interesting enough to suggest a formal presence. So that series is a collage—and I suppose “The Flight” is too—a formal gesture, coming out of a mindset befuddled and attracted to complexity and multiplicity.

“Genius Loci” incorporated passages from the poems of children held by the Nazis in the ghetto at Terezin. The children’s poems survived, though most of them died as children, sent in transports to the death camps. I wrote the first drafts of the series while in Prague, where I struggled to get my head around the beauty and terror of the history of that place, which I was confronted with on every cobbled street. I keenly felt (and welcomed) the irony of being an American naturalist living in one of Europe’s great cities. I needed the poem to track that complexity. And I liked the formal challenge of making the elements broadly varied in formal gesture. That seemed to speak structurally to the very process in which I was engaged. Of course much of this coming-into-form happens in the whirl of composition. I had notes, voluminous notes. I had an unsettled feeling that there was a poem emergent in those notes. I couldn’t write it. I couldn’t write it. I couldn’t write it. And then one day I could, and the form began to announce itself and there was no stopping.

I study jazz piano and my teacher tells me that Stravinsky said, “If you give me form, you give me freedom.” A good motto for a poet as well.

td:

In your collection of essays, The Edges of the Civilized World, you say in “Annual Report” that on the island of Grand Manan your sense of “place as geographic locale and mental habitat coalesce.” As we work on this interview, you are spending a bit of extended time on Grand Manan. What would your annual report be this year? Have you once again spent time picking wild raspberries, gooseberries, black- and blueberries, making jam, picking Labrador tea, meadow rue, and sow thistle? More specifically, how do you perceive the state of things on the island at the end of this summer, and have we moved forward at all in regard to taking on the perspective you mention in that essay: reading our mistakes as opportunities for learning, not as prognostications of doom?

ahd:

The island continues its drift into the future. Herring are sparse. Dulse diminishing as the ocean warms. Salmon aquaculture continues, but without the verve that came with the first wave of this industry. Too many unknowns—how to minimize pollution of the bay, prevent the viral attacks of infectious salmon anemia, prevent farmed stock from escaping and entering wild salmon rivers like the Magaguadavic where they interbreed with and weaken wild fish. Lobsters are plentiful—some islanders say that’s because the ground-fish are gone so the small lobsters have a better chance to survive, though a biologist told me that with warming waters to the south, more lobsters are moving north. Good for us. Bad for Massachusetts. For now. So I guess we’d have to say it’s a sobering time during which no one is quite sure whether we have the tools and smarts for the future that’s coming or maybe that’s already here. And though Canada is a much saner and kinder nation than the United States, the brutality of the times does not skip over our place. The island is just this week mourning the loss of a young man who, after serving in the Canadian military in Afghanistan, could not endure and killed himself.

I lost my brother this year. He died on May 28 after a terrible nine months fighting a rare and lethal cancer. In the last two months of his life, I helped facilitate his care and finances. It was a heartbreaking mess of a time, though I’m grateful that he and I found some genuine closeness in it. Being here at the family place on Grand Manan has been a good place for grieving and contemplation. The state of the island from this perspective is as it always has been: a place of beauty, rugged tranquillity, and simple living. So I guess I’m taking my grief counseling from the island this time around. Yes, I’ve picked some blackberries—though it has been a poor year and they are small and scant. Enough for jam, anyway. As I like to joke when my grandsons come to visit, we eat the landscape when we’re at Grand Manan. A neighbor’s beet greens and lettuce. Scallops, when you can find them, right off the boat. Right now, as I’m writing this, my neighbor is gathering wild apples off my lawn to fatten up five or six deer that have been drifting close to his house. When bow season opens, he’ll take one of the deer for his freezer. The others will winter over, a bit fatter and happier for the fruit. Being part of this local economy is not only a pleasure at the table. As Thoreau had it when he went to Walden, “I grew in those seasons like corn in the night.”

I feel that so keenly when I am here and working a few hours each day in the woods, longing for the woods when I’m in the house. I’ve been cutting a trail in the backwoods—something I’ve wanted to do for decades that grief has compelled me to do this year. Up a steep forested rise, up again and again, through a fern meadow, down into forest of balsam fir and red spruce, white birch, white ash, into the swampy thickets and back out. I think this has been one of the happiest projects of my life—and this during a time of such sadness. In the woods, you see at any moment all stages of living and dying before you—the fallen giant spruces that take decades to rot giving fertile ground for seedlings and fungi and moss that sprout right out of their sides. A rain one day—mushrooms the next. An acre scabbed for lumber ten years ago, now a meadow of ferns, raspberry bushes, and birch saplings. Death is beautiful and fecund in the forest. It’s life.

How have we lost sight of this basic knowledge of the fullness of being? Our public leaders fight and kill and posture and lie and flout their ignorance. What kind of wisdom is motivating this madness? None. Go to the woods, you money-and-power mongers, and shut up for a few days. Just listen. And walk. And bring some peace into your heart and back to the city.

td:

In Writing the Sacred into the Real, you mention hearing Stanley Kunitz say that “originality in art could come only from what was unique in one’s character and experience.” As you look at the body of your work so far, how would you characterize it in relation to other writers who write about the natural world? Who might you consider to be your writing “mother” or “brother” or “sister”?

ahd:

I can tell you what I’ve tried to do and that is to give an authentic account of my sense of the beauty and terror in nature, to learn from science as part of the aesthetic experience, to bring researched material into the lyric voice, to heal, at least in myself, the split between nature and culture, between science and religion, to make my work a vessel for love. If I had to describe myself in one word, I’d say collagist. I want my artistic methods to embody the ideas I espouse. Collage is an ecosystem of unexpected connections. I’ve also wanted nature writing, which can be way too precious and privileged, to take on some responsibility for social and environmental justice, which is why I co-edited with Lauret Savoy the anthology The Colors of Nature.

I suppose my writing mother would be Elizabeth Bishop for her grounding in the material, her attention to place and local story, faith in the image, making the exotic familiar. But I read widely and feel connected to the work of so many poets: among forebears, John Clare, Whitman, A. R. Ammons, Gary Snyder, Muriel Rukeyser, Denise Levertov. There is so much good and interesting writing being done now by poets—Eleni Sikileanos, Katherine Coles, William Stobb, Sean Nevin, Sherwin Bitsui, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Ander Monson. In prose, I really love the work of John Berger. And of course the whole tradition of natural history writing as it morphs into the twentieth century with Barry Lopez, Scott Russell Sanders, Barbara Hurd, Bill Kittredge, James Baldwin, who wrote the very best essays we have that blend memoir with cultural story. Well, you see I am an assembler. I could list on and on. Ask me tomorrow and this list will be different.

td:

How does your work process differ as you are bringing together a book of poems versus a book of nonfiction?

ahd:

The books of poems follow an intuitive process. I write poems until I begin to feel there is enough to anchor a book and then I work with more focus around the formal and thematic interests that seem to coalesce. With The Monarchs I wanted to continue the sequence for a sustained inquiry—exploring the monarch butterfly’s migration behavior and having that work in counterpoint to an exploration of the forces that move human lives—intelligence and desire, science and science fiction. I knew from the start that I wanted an extended sequence. So that book, in a way, was more essayistic in conception. Usually the nonfiction books start with a research question that becomes a thematic thread for the project, so it is much more directed from the start. With the book I just finished, Zoologies, I wanted to use the more intuitive approach to assembling a book that is a collection of short essays. So this is all in flux for me.

td:

What projects are you working on for the next year or so?

ahd:

I’m working on poems. A series called “Little Death Songs” that has come after my brother’s death. And now a set of fourteen-line poems, which aren’t sonnets, though I like the attention span and tension of that form. I admired Gerald Stern’s American Sonnets, which weren’t sonnets—though then again they were. I like that ambiguity. So we’ll see. I’m working on two prose projects. A memoir that may be called “The Fall of the House of WASP” about my pastoral New England childhood in the dawn of the nuclear age. And an exchange of letters (written as real letters, not e-mails) with Gary Paul Nabhan about the relationship between art and science. We were both inspired by the lovely book of letters between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright called The Delicacy and Strength of Lace. And we’re saddened by the demise of letter writing as we all twit our way into the future. So those are all in progress . . .

td:

You have spoken about “assessing what I most love about being here and what I most would like to understand and contribute before leaving.” Clearly your body of work has contributed a great deal to our understanding of the relationship between humans and the ecosystems they find themselves in—for better or worse. Such work has celebrated not only its subjects but also the process of art making. While your readers anticipate many more books from you, what else do you hope to contribute before leaving, and why is this idea of a legacy so important to you?

ahd:

I can’t bear leaving this life without giving back something in reciprocation for the gift of living. So that’s why I want and need to keep writing. I don’t believe in an afterlife other than the culture we make while we’re living. There’s continuity in the whole history of literature and art that lives for us and for those who come after us. So I just want to keep my work going as long as I can, to be a small tributary in that river.