New Year's and the River

It was ten below on New Year's Day and I had gone to the country of my boyhood to get acquainted and to renew old associations. One of the things I knew I must see at once was the river, and though I knew it was frozen throughout most of its course, I also knew that where it ran beneath the old iron bridge, it was free. More than anything else, I wanted to see its water again, the bottom with its familiar stones, to listen to the gurgle as it rippled its way over them. Even though it would be sheathed in ice and the open water shrouded with mist, though there were no birds, no humming hatch of flies, no chance of sky reflections, I still wanted to see it, for the little river meant many things to me.

I hurried along the winter road and the road was beautiful with new snow and the pines along the borders of the fields were laden with it. Even the jack pines looked strange that morning beneath their heavy load, more like spruce trees than pines, but the grandest of all were the white pines with their branches drooping close to the snow, near to breaking with the weight of it.

In a few minutes I was at the bridge, and to my joy for a hundred yards the river was open, though crowded by ice above and below. Underneath me, the water was clear and transparent, more crystalline it seemed than ever. Bronze golden nuggets of gravel moved slowly in the sunlight and in between them danced tiny irridescent bits of shell, whirling in the swift undertow, settling for a moment, only to dance again. To one side was a large unbroken clam shell, the polished mother-of-pearl flashing as it also weaved in the current. The larger rocks held their position though the sands eddied impatiently around them. I could hear the soft rippling clearly now, but as an undertone was the constant swish of ice and slush drifting continually from the solid mass above to that below trying, it seemed, to close completely what open water remained.

How alive the river was in this last open space beneath the bridge. Elsewhere it was dead, but here it was as alive as an open wound, alive and full of sound and movement, and I thought as I stood there and watched it that someday I would fulfill my dream and build a house where I could always be near it, close enough so that I could make that perennial aliveness a part of myself, so that when my mind was weary with thinking and my body of work, I could come down to the rapids and watch it and absorb some of its virility and joy.

As I walked away from the river and the swishing of the ice blended at last with the sound of the drifting snow beside the road, I was glad I came, for it did me good to know that it was free beneath the bridge. Somehow, it made me feel that the year was getting off to a good start, that there was much to look forward to, that simple things which had given happiness in the past were unchangeable and true. I went back to the farm house, back to the snow laden pines and the windswept fields I had left.