Listening to the Same River Twice: Theme and Variations

You cannot step in the same river twice.

heraclites

Like so much in the natural world—aspens in the wind, wood thrush songs, and peepers’ calls—a river, from a certain distance, can sound soothing. It’s full of repeated trills and steady rhythms, soft spurtles, a background reminder of quiet continuity, the appealing murmur of things in their place.

Gurgling and rippling this sunny March afternoon, the Savage flows familiarly through the valley in eastern Garrett County, headed south toward the Potomac River, which will eventually wander, slow and deep— maybe even soothingly—through the nation’s capital. Up here in the mountains, though, it’s rocky, brisk but wadeable. Pulling on rubber boots, I step off the bank and make my way out into the streambed, to the confluence of the Savage and a tributary known locally as Poplar Lick.

Last night, restless again, I’d resorted to a cd I’d borrowed weeks ago from a friend. She has a whole collection of sleep-inducing disks: the sounds of oceans, Hindu chants, rain, and one of running water, which has been collecting dust in my night table drawer. The sound soothes her, she says, drowns out the buzz of midnight angst, lulls her back to sleep. At 3 a.m., I tried it, turning the volume low and listening, wide-eyed, to the ceaseless sound of chafe and clash.

Perhaps I know too much—that rivers are in the business of eating up stone and undermining banks. They work like rasps against a lip of dolomite or granite, grinding and gouging. They can lug tons of topsoil, ferry logs, chisel three feet a year off the edge of a cliff, dramatically change the landscape.

Perhaps my friend can just let the sound of a river’s uninterrupted flow—its quiet undercurrent—quiet her mind, while I, restless, have been doomed to think too much about the river’s frictions and the enigmas they suggest: character, conflict, and the vexing sense I have of the self as a fluid form in need of shaping.

But today, water swirling now around my calves, I’m frazzled and aiming to listen to the river as she does. I’ve been reading Barry Lopez: the sound of fish dreaming, twilight in a still pool downstream, even William Congreve: Music has charms to soothe the savage breast, / To soften rocks. A part of me wants to see if it’s possible to forget what I know, and to hear the way a river might erase a few angsts.

Erasing boundary angsts was what Maryland’s governor had in mind in 1872 when he proclaimed that the eastern boundary of Garrett County would run from the spot where the Mason-Dixon Line crosses the ridge of Savage Mountain straight southwest to the mouth of the Savage River where it dumps into the Potomac. The problem is that rivers and their mouths—like us—don’t always lie still in their beds. The Savage can flood and ebb, its endpoint churn a little to the west and then to the east. Given the possibility of wandering mouths, it’s impossible to know exactly where the river ends.

And given the unlikelihood of a “true self” as some inviolable thing that must be brought to the surface and allowed to shine, it’s even harder to know how to imagine ourselves. Standing in the river, I know I’m pushing this analogy, but what would happen if we imagined ourselves as unfixed meanderers roving within a channel, responding to the sounds of our locales and the smells of our own geology?

States can’t tolerate the ambiguous boundaries we humans often live with. This is especially true if a river serves as a boundary between two entities (think Iraq and Iran, Maryland and Virginia). In such cases, an exact and stable center line of the river needs to be pinpointed, a line that remains essentially unchanged by conditions on the surface. Politicians call that the border.

Hydrologists call it the thalweg: the “valley way,” the deepest continuous inline in a...