I go up by the old children’s path through the woods along the Sand Ripple hollow. Where they hurried or loitered or played, I take my time and stop to rest (as I must) and look around. I go to sit with the living where the dead once sat. I sit where once I sat with Uncle Othy and felt, for a while, quiet and safe.
Really, the most worrisome part of my life on the river has been my rental property in town—that is to say, my old shop. It may be that I would have been better off if I had sold it. But I kept it and rented it on the principle that I needed a regular income that would not involve much work and worry. (I was thinking, as I still am, of the time that may come when I may be unable to look after myself.) But of course I could charge only a small amount. And as for work and worry, there have been times when I have thought of slipping up there in the dark and setting it afire.
The very first people I rented it to were a young couple, from whom I took no money in advance, and who fell into disharmony within two weeks. The husband drove his wife and her boyfriend out of town by beating on the boyfriend’s balky automobile with an oak two-by-four, the car lurching wildly as if in pain, finally speeding away. All I got out of that was a mess to clean up, and several remarks on how my departure had improved the social life up at town.
Aside from such distractions, I took to the river life, returning to it after nearly forty-five years as if I had never known life of any other kind. By all my work, all my thousand small acts of settling here and renewing my life, I had come to be at home in a place that was not mine and that I never intended to be mine. Neither Burley nor Danny ever offered to sell it. I never offered to buy it. I was past the time in my life when I might have had territorial desires. And yet I had laid my claim on the place, had made it answerable to my life. Of course, you can’t do that and get away free. You can’t choose, it seems, without being chosen. For the place, in return, had laid its claim on me and had made my life answerable to it.
And so I came to belong to this place on the river just as I had come to belong to Port William—as in a way, of course, I still do belong to Port William. Being here satisfies me. I have no thought of going away. If I knew for sure that I would die here, I would be glad. And yet definite as all this is, it seems surrounded by the indefinite, like a boat in a fog. I can’t look back from where I am now and feel that I have been very much in charge of my life. Certainly I have lived on the edge of the Port William community, and I am farther than ever out on the edge of it now. But I feel that I have lived on the edge even of my own life. I have made plans enough, but I see now that I have never lived by plan. Any more than if I had been a bystander watching me live my life, I don’t feel that I ever have been quite sure what was going on. Nearly everything that has happened to me has happened by surprise. All the important things have happened by surprise. And whatever has been happening usually has already happened before I have had time to expect it. The world doesn’t stop because you are in love or in mourning or in need of time to think. And so when I have thought I was in my story or in charge of it, I really have been only on the edge of it, carried along. Is this because we are in an eternal story that is happening partly in time?
Of course, I know well what it is to be in a boat in a fog, and mainly I count it among the pleasures. In the early morning in the fog I can’t see the river from the porch. I go down the path, following it step by step as it is revealed, and then down the dug steps in the bank to the river’s edge. The boat takes shape at first as though it is floating in the air. And then, coming closer, I see its reflection on the water. I loosen the chain and toss it into the boat with a crash that seems more substantial than anything I can see. The fog drifts on a current of air, usually upstream. I step into the boat and feel its buoyancy. Ripples go out from it. I go to the middle seat, place the oars in the locks, and set the boat out onto the water, free of the shore. I row quietly, close along the bank. The river has only the one visible edge. It could be as wide as the ocean. I come to where the end of the trotline is tied to a stout root. I go to the bow seat then and catch the line and raise it. I work my way out along the line from one snooded hook to the next, taking off fish (if any). Now I can see neither shore. The line rises, dripping, out of the water ahead of me and disappears behind. If a fish is on it, I will feel it, something alive out in the fog, down in the dark. Sometimes, after being bent to my work for a while, I will straighten up and see that the fog has lifted and I am again in the known world.
Back at the house, with the river and its mood still in my mind, I fix breakfast and (if the weather is fine) eat out on the porch. And then I have my shave and set the place to rights. If the fog has cleared, the sunlight, glancing off the river, will be rippling and swaying on the walls and ceiling of my house, so that for a while I seem to be living within the element of living light.
I have, to fill my mind and occupy my hands, the daily and seasonal rounds of my economy. I have food to harvest and preserve in the summer and fall, firewood to gather and saw up and split in the fall and winter, the garden to prepare and plant in the spring. I have clothes and bedclothes to wash, and myself to keep clean and presentable. I have the endless little jobs of housekeeping and repair. I have my duties in town. I have my old customers, grown shaggy, who come down the path and call out, “Anybody home?” or “Jayber? You here?” Sometimes in the afternoons, especially Sunday afternoons, back when I got around better than I do now, I would take long walks up in the woods of the valley sides, or in the late splendid woodland that Athey used to call “the Nest Egg.” For relief from much eating of fish, it has often been possible to shoot a young squirrel or groundhog or (in cold weather, when I could hope to keep the meat from spoiling) a yearling deer. I have books to read, and much to sit and watch.
I try not to let good things go by unnoticed. In spring the foliage slowly closes in the prospects from all the windows and the porch. When the trees are in full leaf, this place, close to the road as it is, seems remote and set apart. When the leaves fall, the distances lengthen all around. The river is more visible from the house then, and I can see the pastures and cornfields on the far side, and beyond them the hills. Some days a strong breeze fairly fills the place. Every leaf moves, and the sound is like a long breath. Sometimes there is a breeze that moves the leaves without a sound.
And I have known days when the temperature would not rise above zero, when snow would be deep, ice on the river, the north wind rattling the branches. Then this house is a little cell of warmth, a cold brilliance coming in at the windows, a good fire in the drumstove, a pot of bean soup simmering, the dog asleep on the floor. Nobody comes, only the birds to the suet feeders. And I have nothing to do but read and watch. I seem to be in a room in the wind. I talk to the dog, who raises her head to listen and then goes back to sleep.
In the winter and the spring, of course, we who live by the river are ever mindful of the possibility of flood, which is both a dread and an excitement. When the river rises and the currents quicken, it is hard to watch with a quiet mind. When it starts out of its banks, you watch with uneasiness and a wonderful alertness and curiosity. It is like being in a small stall with a big horse. The risen river is large, alive, dangerous, not of your mind, and closer to you than it has been before. You watch.
You watch for what it may do and for what it may bring. You fear what it may do. You feel a little tug to get in your boat and drift away with it. You wonder if you may find, coming down among the rafts of drift, the debris of woodlands and fields and the trash out of human dumps, something that may be of use. Once I caught a pretty good canoe, and once an extra-nice privy that I tied to a tree over by the garden and remodeled into a toolshed.
If the river comes high enough to be a convincing danger (and I can’t forget that the water was up to the eaves here in thirty-seven), then I will have it on my mind even when I think I am not thinking about it. I will wake up in the night, listening already before I’m awake for the suck of the current or the slap-slap of win
dwaves against the porch posts.
My first thought always is of my boat. When the river is rising or falling, the boat must be kept free, drawn up or pushed off so that it rises and falls with the river. There is a strange pleasure, when the river is rising, in seeing the boat always drawn up in a new place, floating where maybe the day before I walked. And there is relief, though not much pleasure, in seeing the banks and slopes, slick and shining with mud, appearing again above the falling waters. You kick footholds into the mud as you shove the boat out again and again into the river, keeping it afloat. Eventually, of course, you have to clear the driftwood off the garden and pick up the stranded cans and bottles and pieces of plastic.
But when you have made everything as safe as you can and are reasonably assured that you won’t have to load up your stuff and go, flood-time will repay you just to sit and watch. The river seems to be holding itself up before you like a page opened to be read. There is no knowing how the currents move. They shift and boil and eddy. They are swifter in some places than in others. To think of “a place” on the flowing surface soon baffles your mind, for the “places” are ever changing and moving. The current in all its various motions and speeds flows along, and that flowing may be stirred again at the surface by the wind in all its various motions. Who can think of it? Maybe the ducks have mastered it, and the little grebes who are as much at home underneath as on top and who ride the currents for pleasure.
The risen river always leaves something that sooner or later it comes back to get. If it leaves ice, Art Rowanberry used to say, the river is apt to come back in the same season, looking for it—and that often proves to be true. What the river leaves, including ice, is usually more or less a nuisance. Most cans and bottles, once used, are useless. You’ll not easily find a use for big clots of plastic foam. The driftwood is often too rotten for anything, but occasionally I find a good board, or a tree sound enough to make firewood.
I am always on the lookout for firewood. I gather every burnable scrap of driftwood, saw up every windfall within carrying distance, gladly accept any loads of poles, old fenceposts, or scrap lumber that anybody wants to give away or trade for haircuts or fish.
Water is a bigger problem here than fire—water, I mean, for drinking, cooking, washing, and bathing. “Why, Jayber, you’ve got a whole riverful of water,” somebody is always telling me, and that is probably the joke I’m the tiredest of. In the summer, when it is dry, my rain barrels are soon empty. I must carry all my household water, then, from the well. And also in the winter, when the rain barrels can’t be used because they would freeze and burst. If the river is clear enough in the summer, I can do some of my laundry off the end of the boat, but it’s hard to get the white things white enough in the river. I have to admit I am finicky about this. Things that are clean ought to look clean. There is a great pleasure in being clean yourself in a clean house.
When it is warm enough I bathe in the river. I have been often advised that bathing in the river is using dirty water to get clean (that is another joke I am tired of). But in warm weather it is far easier for me to go to the water than to bring the water to me, far more promising to jump into the river than into the well. To get clean you must use what you are given. Summer afternoons down here on the riverbank can be as steamy and airless as the inside of a kettle. I go about my work then with my clothes sweated through and sticking to me. Thoughts of anything freshening hang about in the mind. I wait until all the work of the day is done, supper finished, and the dishes put away. And then I take clean clothes, soap, and a towel and go down to the water. I lay the clean clothes and the towel on the bow of the boat and strip off my sweaty things. Carrying the soap, I wade out until the water is up to my chin. I soap my head and face. As I wade back toward the shore, I soap the rest of my body as it emerges. I sit on the gunnel of the boat and soap my feet. Then I put down the soap, stand up, take two steps, dive, and swim down into the dark to the limit of breath. When I wade out again, I am cool and clean, delighted as a risen soul.
If the mosquitoes will leave me alone, I love to sit or lie out on the porch and watch the dark come. Past sundown, the light is charmed, the way it is in the early morning. First there will be the swallows circling and dipping over the river. Maybe a kingfisher will come rattling by, skimming close above the surface of the water. Maybe I will see herons flying to roost. And then the bats begin to flicker in and out of sight, and the fireflies rise up out of the weeds, lighting their little lights, and the stars come out. Past a certain time, the darkness and quietness are present all around, the night creatures begin their calls, and you can feel something of the inward life of the world.
In late winter the owls begin to mate and I hear the paired ones calling to each other, back and forth. The wood ducks begin to pair off. I see them sitting together in the trees near the house, and hear the hen ducks crying as they fly. I know spring is coming when, one morning, I hear a phoebe calling, and the woodpeckers drum on hollow trees and the tin roof of my house. Spring has certainly come when I hear the little yellow-throated warbler that sings in the tops of the tallest sycamores. In the summer dusk there is always a pewee calling his name from a dead branch somewhere on the edge of an opening. The Carolina wren sings the whole year round. I hear the frogs and toads at night, starting with the peepers in early spring, and later the crickets and katydids. Something wild is always blooming, from twinleaf and bloodroot early in spring to beeweed in late fall, things of intricate, limitless beauty. Often I fear that I am not paying enough attention.
And how many hours have I spent in watching the reflections on the water? When the air is still, then so is the surface of the river. Then it holds a perfectly silent image of the world that seems not to exist in this world. Where, I have asked myself, is this reflection? It is not on the top of the water, for if there is a little current the river can slide frictionlessly and freely beneath the reflection and the reflection does not move. Nor can you think of it as resting on the bottom of the air. The reflection itself seems a plane of no substance, neither water nor air. It rests, I think, upon quietness. Things may rise from the water or fall from the air, and, without touching the reflection, break it. It disappears. Without going anywhere, it disappears.
Here on the river I have known peace and beauty such as I never knew in any other place. There is always work here that I need to be doing and I have many worries, for life on the edge seems always threatening to go over the edge. But I am always surprised, when I look back on times here that I know to have been laborious or worrisome or sad, to discover that they were never out of the presence of peace and beauty, for here I have been always in the world itself.
You may think, then, that I had arrived, by so simple a movement as that between Port William and the river, at the perfect solution to my problems. But that would be a mistake. It was a good solution, good sometimes beyond praise, but it was far from perfect. Because (to start with) I was far from perfect. However interesting and lovely my days were, I could get from one day to the next only by passing through a night. I have, it is true, known lovely nights here: nights of sound sleep and good dreams, and nights made wakeful by happy thoughts. But I have not always been a good sleeper, and my thoughts at night have sometimes been far from happy.
Maybe there is a kind of justice that says you must pay for good days with bad nights. And maybe my debt is paid now, for lately I sleep well. But my bad nights continued for a long time after I came to the river. They got worse, in fact. To be alone here in the daytime often doubles the pleasure. But to be alone at night is sometimes only to be defenseless against the oncoming knowledge of incompleteness and imperfection, mine and the world’s. Why is hate so easy and love so difficult?
In the daytime, going about my work, I would often make up little rhymes and repeat them to myself. If, say, I was weeding my beans, I would get a rhyme going in my head, and it would say,Beans
Is the means
That redeems,
It
seems.
And what
Do beans redeem?
The dream
Of being fat
When times are lean.
And I would repeat it in my mind, dissatisfied with the part about being fat, which I had never been at any time, and trying to find a better word than lean to rhyme with dream. Or I would be splitting firewood, a good straight-grained block of ash, say, and I would be sort of exclaiming to myself,I hit
Six licks
And split
Six sticks!
Or, after a bad storm, I would say,They fell,
They blew,
They fled,
They flew.
But of my bad nights I made only one rhyme and it repeated itself to me time and again:Mortality
And error,
Partiality,
And terror.
It is not a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that the world is always passing and irrecoverable, to be known only in loss. To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain. It is a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that you are a human and therefore joined by kind to all that hates the world and hurries its passing—the violence and greed and falsehood that overcome the world that is meant to be overcome by love.
On such nights I fell from mere sleep into bad dreams. I would be in a place without memories, wholly cut away from history and the known world. It was a city without trees or birds, with no named streets. The days over it were darkened and the nights lighted. I would be hurrying through it in panic and despair toward a destination I did not know. And around me in the nameless streets in the dimness of day or night, anonymous people were killing one another with stones and fire.