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Tom Splitt, a composer out of Colorado, has graciously offered us the use of an original composition, entitled "The River." This selection is from his album "Elan." If you would like to listen to "The River" while browsing this page, just click on the start button below. If you would like to learn more about this or other Tom Splitt CDs, please visit tomsplitt.com. I choose to listen to the river for a while, thinking river thoughts, before joining the night and the stars. Night and day the river flows. If time is the mind of space, the River is the soul of the desert. Brave boatmen come, they go, they die, the voyage flows on forever. We are all canyoneers. We are all passengers on this little mossy ship, this delicate dory sailing round the sun that humans call the earth. Joy, shipmates, joy. Water, water, water . . . There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount, a perfect ratio of water to rock. Of water to sand, insuring that wide, free, open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be. If you' re not beside a real river, close your eyes, and sit down beside an imaginary one, a river where you feel comfortable and safe. Know that the water has wisdom, in its motion through the world, as much wisdom as any of us have. Picture yourself as the water. We are liquid; we innately share water's wisdom. Meditation Draws Its Power From the Water To have some parts flowing free again . . . with deer grazing on its banks . . . ducks and geese raising their young in the backwaters . . . eddies and twists and turns for canoeists . . . and fishing opportunities such as Lewis and Clark enjoyed . . . would be the finest possible tribute to the men of the Expedition, and a priceless gift for our children. And I count myself more fortunate with each passing season to have recourse to these quiet, tree-strewn, untrimmed acres by the water. I would think it a sad commentary on the quality of American life if, with our pecuniary and natural abundance, we could not secure for our generation and those to come the existence of . . . a substantial remnant of a once great endowment of wild and scenic rivers. Arguing for passage of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968) A brook can be a friend in a special way. It talks to you with splashy gurgles. It cools your toes and lets you sit quietly beside it when you don't feel like speaking. Sit by a river. Find peace and meaning in the rhythm of the lifeblood of the Earth. All the water there will be, is. Boundaries don't protect rivers, people do. Children of a culture born in a water-rich environment, we have never really learned how important water is to us. We understand it, but we do not respect it. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare to let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure. Wild rivers are earth's renegades, defying gravity, dancing to their own tunes, resisting the authority of humans, always chipping away, and eventually always winning. When protected, rivers serve as visible symbols of the care we take as temporary inhabitants and full-time stewards of a living, profoundly beautiful heritage of nature. Men may dam it and say that they have made a lake, but it will still be a river. It will keep its nature and bide its time, like a caged animal alert for the slightest opening. In time, it will have its way; the dam, like the ancient cliffs, will be carried away piecemeal in the currents. We labor long and earnestly for peace, because war threatens the survival of man. It is time we labored with equal passion to defend our environment. A polluted stream can be as lethal as a bullet. Choosing to save a river is more often an act of passion than of careful calculation. You make the choice because the river has touched your life in an intimate and irreversible way, because you are unwilling to accept its loss. Any river is really the summation of the whole valley. To think of it as nothing but water is to ignore the greater part. What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn't have any doubt—it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn't want to go anywhere else. Sometimes luck is with you, and sometimes not, but the important thing is to take the dare. Those who climb mountains or raft rivers understand this. There are many ways to salvation, and one of them is to follow a river. You don't need it, but will you take some advice from a Californian who's been around for a while? Cherish these rivers. Witness for them. Enjoy their unimprovable purpose as you sense it, and let those rivers that you never visit comfort you with the assurance that they are there, doing wonderfully what they have always done. Keep your rivers flowing as they will, and you will continue to know the most important of all freedoms—the boundless scope of the human mind to contemplate wonders, and to begin to understand their meaning. Let the mountains talk, let the river run. Once more, and forever. In a mucked up lovely river, When breezes are soft and skies are fair, The song of the river ends not at her banks but in the hearts of those who have loved her. Or like the snow falls in the river, It is difficult to find in life any event which so effectually condenses intense nervous sensation into the shortest possible space of time as does the work of shooting, or running an immense rapid. There is no toil, no heart breaking labour about it, but as much coolness, dexterity, and skill as man can throw into the work of hand, eye, and head; knowledge of when to strike and how to do it; knowledge of water and rock, and of the one hundred combinations which rock and water can assume—for these two things, rock and water, taken in the abstract, fail as completely to convey any idea of their fierce embracings in the throes of a rapid as the fire burning quietly in a drawing-room fireplace fails to convey the idea of a house wrapped and sheeted in flames. Peace I ask of thee, o River Little drops of water, little grains of sand, make the mighty ocean, and the pleasant land. So the little minutes, humble though they be, make the mighty ages of eternity. The mark of a successful man is one that has spent an entire day on the bank of a river without feeling guilty about it. We call upon the waters that rim the earth, horizon to horizon, that flow in our rivers and streams, that fall upon our gardens and fields, and we ask that they teach us and show us the way. In a country where nature has been so lavish and where we have been so spendthrift of indigenous beauty, to set aside a few rivers in their natural state should be considered an obligation. Arguing for passage of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968) The affluent society has built well in terms of economic progress, but has neglected the protection of the very water we drink as well as the values of fish and wildlife, scenic, and outdoor recreation resources. Although often measureless in commercial terms, these values must be preserved by a program that will guarantee America some semblance of her great heritage of beautiful rivers. Arguing for passage of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968) A man of wisdom delights in water. We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one. In spite of the durability of rock-walled canyons and the surging power of cataracting water, the wild river is a fragile thing—the most fragile portion of the wilderness country. The river called. The call is the thundering rumble of distant rapids, the intimate roar of white water . . . a primeval summons to primordial values. A river is the cosiest of friends. You must love it and live with it before you can know it. In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time. The stream sings a subdued music, a scarcely audible lilt, faint and fluid syllables not quite said. If slips away into its future, where it already is, and flows steadily forth from up the canyon, a fountain of rumors from regions known to it and not to me. We don't tend to ask where a lake comes from. It lies before us, contained and complete, tantalizing in its depth but not its origin. A river is a different kind of mystery, a mystery of distance and becoming, a mystery of source. Touch its fluent body and you touch far places. You touch a story that must end somewhere but cannot stop telling itself, a story that is always just beginning. We are never far from the lilt and swirl of living water. Whether to fish or swim or paddle, of only to stand and gaze, to glance as we cross a bridge, all of us are drawn to rivers, all of us happily submit to their spell. We need their familiar mystery. We need their fluent lives interflowing with our own. How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on. Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself, thou fillest us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses. . . . I am beginning to understand that the stream the scientists are studying is not just a little creek. It's a river of energy that moves across regions in great geographic cycles. Here, life and death are only different points on a continuum. The stream flows in a circle through time and space, turning death into life across coastal ecosystems, as it has for more than a million years. But such streams no longer flow in the places where most of us live. The Gift of Salmon, Discover Magazine, May 2003 I have seen salmon swimming upstream to spawn even with their eyes pecked out. Even as they are dying, as their flesh is falling away from their spines, I have seen salmon fighting to protect their nests. I have seen them push up creeks so small that they rammed themselves across the gravel. I have seen them swim upstream with huge chunks bitten out of their bodies by bears. Salmon are incredibly driven to spawn. They will not give up. This gives me hope. The Gift of Salmon, Discover Magazine, May 2003 'The north changes the world. In the winter the snow comes, covers the land. When it breaks in the spring, the mountains and hills will gather all the deteriorated stuff and bring it down to the Columbia, the main channel, and take it away. What goes out in the ocean will never return. And we have a brand new world in spring. The high water takes everything out, washes everything down. That's why we pray to the water, every morning and night.' This is not an attitude found in the Army Corps of Engineers literature. Quoted by William Dietrich, Northwest Passage If you grew up in the country, chances are you have fond memories of lazy days down by a river, creek or pond. To trace the history of a river or a raindrop . . . is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble upon divinity, which like feeding the lake, and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself all over again. I stand by the river and I know that it has been here yesterday and will be here tomorrow and that therefore, since I am part of its pattern today, I also belong to all its yesterdays and will be a part of all its tomorrows. This is a kind of earthly immortality, a kinship with rivers and hills and rocks, with all things and all creatures that have ever lived or ever will live or have their being on the earth. It is my assurance of an orderly continuity in the great design of the universe. If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. For an instant, as I bobbed into the channel, I had the sensation of sliding down the vast, titled face of the continent. It was then that I felt the cold needles of Alpine springs at my fingertips and the warmth of the Gulf pulling me southward. Moving with me, leaving its taste upon my mouth and spouting under me in dancing springs of sand, was the immense body of the continent itself, flowing like the river was flowing, grain by grain, mountain by mountain, down to the sea. I was streaming over ancient sea beds thrust aloft where giant reptiles had once sported; I was wearing down the face of time. I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in the end it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a selection from among the innumerable sources which flow together to compose it. At what point in its course does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means? Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new ornament. Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. Life is always flowing on like a river, sometimes with murmurs, sometimes without bending this way ot that, wed do no exactly se why; now ion beautiful picturesque places, now through barren and uninteresting scenes, but always flowing with a look of treachery about it; it is so swift, so voiceless, yet so continuous. There's a river somewhere that flows through the lives of everyone. The woods are made for the hunters of dreams, When the well's dry, we know the worth of water. Rivers hardly ever run in a straight line. The farmhouse lingers, though averse to square Rivers are inherently interesting. They mold landscapes, create fertile deltas, provide trade routes, a source for food and water; a place to wash and play; civilizations emerged next to rivers in China, India, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. They sustain life and bring death and destruction. They are ferocious at times; gentle at times. They are placid and mean. They trigger conflict and delineate boundaries. Rivers are the stuff of metaphor and fable, painting and poetry. Rivers unite and divide—a thread that runs from source to exhausted release. A river seems a magic thing. A magic, moving, living part of the very earth itself. Everywhere water is a thing of beauty, gleaming in the dewdrops; singing in the summer rain; shining in the ice-gems till the leaves all seem to turn to living jewels; spreading a golden veil over the setting sun; or a white gauze around the midnight moon. He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before—this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All as a-shake and a-shiver—glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea. "So-this-is-a-River." OR "The River," corrected the Rat. . . . It's my world, and I don't want any other. What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing. Lord! the times we've had together! There's nothing . . . absolutely nothing . . . half so much worth doing as simply messing around in boats. A whole river is mountain country and hill country and flat country and swamp and delta country, is rock bottom and sand bottom and weed bottom and mud bottom, is blue, green, red, clear, brown, wide, narrow, fast, slow, clean and filthy water, is all the kinds of trees and grasses and all the breeds of animals and birds and men that pertain and have ever pertained to its changing shores, is a thousand differing and not compatible things in between that point where enough of the highland drainlets have trickled together to form it, and that wide, flat, probably desolate place where it discharges itself into the salt of the sea. I have never seen a river that I could not love. Moving water . . . has a fascinating vitality. It has power and grace and associations. It has a thousand colors and a thousand shapes, yet it follows laws so definite that the tiniest streamlet is an exact replica of a great river. To live by a large river is to be kept in the heart of things. City life was gettin' us down, Sung by Albert Hammond (1972) - YouTube If a man fails to honor the rivers, he shall not gain the life from them. The trees reflected in the river—they are unconscious of a spiritual world so near to them. So are we. In this sometimes turbulent world, the river is a cosmic symbol of durability and destiny; awesome, but steadfast. In this period of deep national concern, I wish everyone could live for a while beside a great river. You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you. The river has taught me to listen; you will learn from it, too. The river knows everything; one can learn everything from it. Between earth and earth's atmosphere, the amount of water remains constant; there is never a drop more, never a drop less. This is a story of circular infinity, of a planet birthing itself. A river is more than an amenity—it is a treasure that offers a necessity of life that must be rationed among those who have the power over it. What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wilderness? We grow up hearing so often that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points that we end up thinking it is also the best way to get there. A river knows better—:it has to do with how it dissipates the energy of its flow most efficiently; and how, in its bends, the sediment deposited soon turns into marshes and swampy islands, harboring all manner of interesting life, imparting charm and character to the whole waterway. I would defy you to find a river on this planet that prefers to run straight, unless it has been taught so by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. I've known rivers; I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. Water is God's gift to living souls, to cleanse us, to purify us, to sustain us and to renew us. . . . the time has also come to identify and preserve free-flowing stretches of our great rivers before growth and development make the beauty of the unspoiled waterway a memory. Rivers have what man most respects and longs for in his own life—a capacity for renewal and replenishment, continual energy, creativity, cleansing. (A Montana statue) holds that a river has a right to overwhelm its banks and inundate its floodplain. Well, that's interesting, because it's not a right that we assign to the river. The river has earned it through centuries of deluging and shaping the floodplain, and the floodplain has a right to its rampaging river. They've earned their rights through a kind of reciprocal action. If our salmon are not healthy, then our watersheds are not healthy—and if our watersheds our not healthy, then we have truly squandered our heritage and mortgaged our future. A Tale of Two Rivers: National Conference of Trout Unlimited, August 16, 2000 I started out thinking of America as highways and state lines. As I got to know it better, I began to think of it as rivers. Most of what I love about the country is a gift of the rivers. . . . America is a great story, and there is a river on every page of it. Rivers run through our history and folklore, and link us as a people. They nourish and refresh us and provide a home for dazzling varieties of fish and wildlife and trees and plants of every sort. We are a nation rich in rivers. Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: What is soft is strong. In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it. Another Interpretation Water flows humbly to the lowest level. Nothing is weaker than water, yet for overcoming what is hard and strong, nothing surpasses it. . . . perhaps our grandsons, having never seen a wild river, will never miss the chance to set a canoe in singing waters . . . glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Water is the most critical resource issue of our lifetime and our children's lifetime. The health of our waters is the principal measure of how we live on the land. A river is the report card for its watershed. To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together. Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountains and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books. A river, though, has so many things to say that it is hard to know what it says to each of us. Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn't. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters. I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by and I who watched. On the river the heat mirages danced with each other and then they danced through each other and then they joined hands and danced around each other. Eventually the water joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river. We sat on the bank and the river went by. As always, it was making sounds to itself, and now it made sounds to us. It would be hard to find three men sitting side by side who knew better what a river was saying. Change not the river, for rocks in the river are good and are like our problems—without them we would not know if there was any current. When time comes for us to again rejoin the infinite stream of water flowing to and from the great timeless ocean, our little droplet of soulful water will once again flow with the endless stream. Men travel far to see a city, but few seem curious about a river. Every rivers has, nevertheless, its individuality, its great silent interest. Every river has, moreover, its influence over the people who pass their lives within sight of its waters. Many a time have I merely closed my eyes at the end of yet another troublesome day and soaked my bruised psyche in wild water, rivers remembered and rivers imagined. Rivers course through my dreams, rivers cold and fast, rivers well-known and rivers nameless, rivers that seem like ribbons of blue water twisting through wide valleys, narrow rivers folded in layers of darkening shadows, rivers that have eroded down deep into the mountain's belly, sculpted the land, peeled back the planet's history exposing the texture of time itself. Rivers know this: There is no hurry, we shall get there some day. Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known. We let a river shower its banks with a spirit that invades the people living there, and we protect that river, knowing that without its blessings the people have no source of soul. A river sings a holy song conveying the mysterious truth that we are a river, and if we are ignorant of this natural law, we are lost. When in making our way through a forest we hear the loud boom of a waterfall, we know that the stream is descending a precipice. If a heavy rumble and roar, then we know it is passing over a craggy incline. But not only are the existence and size of these larger characters of its channel proclaimed, but all the others. Go to the fountain-canyons of the Merced. Some portions of its channel will appear smooth, others rough, here a slope, there a vertical wall, here a sandy meadow, there a lake-bowl, and the young river speaks and sings all the smaller characters of the smooth slope and downy hush of meadow as faithfully as it sings the great precipices and rapid inclines, so that anyone who has learned the language of running water will see its character in the dark. Beside the grand history of the glaciers and their own, the mountain streams sing the history of every avalanche or earthquake and of snow, all easily recognized by the human ear, and every word evoked by the falling leaf and drinking deer, beside a thousand other facts so small and spoken by the stream in so low a voice the human ear cannot hear them. Wonderful how completely everything in wild nature fits into us, as if truly part and parent of us. The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and; tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love. Can we afford clean water? Can we afford rivers and lakes and streams and oceans which continue to make possible life on this planet? Can we afford life itself? Those questions were never asked as we destroyed the waters of our nation, and they deserve no answers as we finally move to restore and renew them. These questions answer themselves. Our planet is beset with a cancer which threatens our very existence and which will not respond to the kind of treatment that has been prescribed in the past. The cancer of water pollution was engendered by our abuse of our lakes, streams, rivers, and oceans; it has thrived on our half-hearted attempts to control it; and like any other disease, it can kill us. We have ignored this cancer for so long that the romance of environmental concern is already fading in the shadow of the grim realities of lakes, rivers and bays where all forms of life have been smothered by untreated wastes, and oceans which no longer provide us with food. Ancient rock paintings remind us that there are no unclaimed lands, that people have always lived here. They are wayposts along the river journey to the interior of the mind and heart. It's hard to see a river all at once, especially in the mountains. Down on the plains, rivers run in their course as straightforward as time, channeled toward the sea. But up in the headwaters, a river isn't a point where you stand. In the beginnings of the river, you teeter on the edge of a hundred tiny watersheds where one drop of water is always tipping the balance from one stream to another. History changes with each tiny event, shaping an outcome that we can only fully grasp in hindsight. And that view changes as we move farther downstream. The ancient Irish bards knew the Salmon of Knowledge as the giver of all life's wisdom. In the salmon's leap of understanding like a leap of faith, we can see ourselves "in our element," immersed in the river of life. The cycle of the salmon's journey reminds us that all rivers flow to the same sea. The rapids beat below the boat The river moves from land to water to land, in and out of organisms, reminding us what native peoples have never forgotten: that you cannot separate the land from the water, or the people from the land. The first river you paddle runs through the rest of your life. It bubbles up in pools and eddies to remind you who you are. We are deep at the bottom of this river of time, caught up in the current of the moment where all the rivers rendezvous. Our precious heritage of natural and unspoiled beauty and unpolluted streams, once exhausted and destroyed, can never be replaced. . . . We have a golden opportunity to save the few remaining scenic and wild rivers as part of our nation's heritage for this and coming generations. As long as there are young men with the light of adventure in their eyes or a touch of wilderness in their souls, rapids will be run. Gutta cavat lapidem. (Dripping water hollows out a stone.) Lying like short curls of thread thrown onto a map, the protected rivers remain strongholds of the free-flow and refuges of the riparian Eden, of the mountain farmer and the rural landowner. The rivers are stretched-out green reserves overflowing with life, potential, and promise. When we save a river, we save a major part of an ecosystem, and we save ourselves as well because of our dependence—physical, economic, spiritual—on the water and its community of life. Rivers are exquisite in their abilities to nurture life, sublime in functioning detail, impressive in contributions of global significance. Rivers are magnets for the imagination, for conscious pondering and subconscious dreams, thrills, fears. People stare into the moving water, captivated, as they are when gazing into a fire. What is it that draws and holds us? The rivers' reflections of our lives and experiences are endless. Streams represent constant rebirth. The water flows in, forever new, yet forever the same; they complete a journey from beginning to end, and then they embark on the journey again. The river is the center of the land, the place where the waters, and much more, come together. Here is the home of wildlife, the route of explorers, and recreation paradise. . . . Only fragments of our inheritance remain unexploited, but these streams are more valuable than ever. Rivers are highways that move on and bear us whither we wish to go. Don't push the river—it flows by itself The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river. To drown a river beneath its own impounded water, by damming, is to kill what it was and to settle for something else. When the damming happens without good reason . . . then it’s a tragedy of diminishment for the whole planet, a loss of one more wild thing, leaving Earth just a little flatter and tamer and simpler and uglier than before. Who owns Cross Creek? The redbirds, I think, more than I, for they will have their nests even in the face of delinquent mortgages. And after I am dead, who am childless, the human ownership of grove and field and hammock is hypothetical. But a long line of redbirds and whippoorwills and blue-jays and ground doves will descend from the present owners of nests in the orange trees, and their claim will be less subject to dispute than that of any human heirs. Houses are individual and can be owned, like nests, and fought for. But what of the land? It seems to me that the Earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used, but not owned. It gives itself in response to love and tending, offers it seasonal flowering and fruiting. But we are tenants and not possessors, lovers and not masters. Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time. There is no rushing a river. When you go there, you go at the pace of the water and that pace ties you into a flow that is older than life on this planet. Acceptance of that pace, even for a day, changes us, reminds us of other rhythms beyond the sound of our own heartbeats. Rivers are the primal highways of life. From the crack of time, they had borne men's dreams, and in their lovely rush to elsewhere, fed our wanderlust, mimicked our arteries, and charmed our imaginations in a way the static pond or vast and savage ocean never could. A river does not just happen; it has a beginning and and end. Its story is written in rich earth, in ice, and in water-carved stone, and its story as the lifeblood of the land is filled with colour, music and thunder. Water is the formless potential out of which creation emerged. It is the ocean of unconsciousness enveloping the islands of consciousness. Water bathes us at birth and again at death, and in between it washes away sin. It is by turns the elixir of life or the renewing rain or the devastating flood. All things are connected, like the blood that runs in your family . . . The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father. The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes, and feed our children. If we sell you our land, you must remember, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother. And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain Everyone lives downstream. Even those idealists who live with their heads in the clouds live downstream . . . moreso those whose heads are buried in the sand. Ah . . . timelessness, a river's secret weapon. Lichen part, line hero's path, as crowd bow low, defy powrs' wrath ~ Inspired By ~ This Past Week's Harsh and Gentle Environmental Events Leading to and Surrounding Earth Day ~ Dedicated To ~ The Power of Peace & Environmentalists Everywhere I have left almost to the last the magic of water, an element which owing to its changefulness of form and mood and color and to the vast range of its effects is ever the principal source of landscape beauty, and has like music a mysterious influence over the mind. River, take me along I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there; its roar shook both the earth and me. Dark brown is the river, In A Child's Garden of Verses and Underwoods There is no music like a little river's . . . It takes the mind out-of-doors . . . and . . . it quiets a man down like saying his prayers. To the lost man, to the pioneer penetrating a new country, to the naturalist who wishes to see the wild land at its wildest, the advice is always the same—follow a river. The river is the original forest highway. It is nature's own Wilderness Road. I come from haunts of coot and hern, Who hears the rippling of rivers will not utterly despair of anything. It is pleasant to have been to a place the way a river went. The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks where the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets. I was born upon thy bank, river, Rivers must have been the guides which conducted the footsteps of the first travelers. They are the constant lure, when they flow by our doors, to distant enterprise and adventure, and, by a natural impulse, the dwellers on their banks will at length accompany their currents to the lowlands of the globe, or explore at their invitation the interior of continents. After the doctor's departure Koznyshev felt inclined to go to the the river with his fishing rod. He was fond of angling, and seemed proud of being able to like such a stupid occupation. Rivers are places that renew our spirit, connect us with our past, and link us directly with the flow and rhythum of the natural world. The face of the river, in time, became a wonderful book . . . which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it had uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. It was a kind of solemn, drifting down the big still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't even feel like talking loud, and it wasn't often that we laughed, only a little kind of low chuckle. A river is the most human and companionable of all inanimate things. It has a life, a character, a voice of its own, and is as full of good fellowship as a sugar-maple is of sap. It can talk in various tones, loud or low, and of many subjects grave and gay . . . For real company and friendship, there is nothing outside of the animal kingdom that is comparable to a river. It is with rivers as it is with people: The greatest are not always the most agreeable nor the best to live with. May the countryside and the gliding valley streams content me. Lost to fame, let me love river and woodland. If you gave me several million years, there would be nothing that did not grow in beauty if it were surrounded by water. But I also know that in places, the river still runs deep, and though I've floated it in these places, it hasn't revealed itself in such obvious ways. I know that it might be months—years, even—before I understand what it has to teach me. I still need to give myself over to the flow and pattern and rhythm of it to learn its lessons and hear its messages. The river is inside me now, I know, and I need only wait and see where the current takes me, and what lies beneath it. It's clear to me that I will return here, as well as to other wilderness frontiers within me—whether next year or some time later—because I know that what the river says is what I need to hear: to know myself, to feel wild again, to confront my own limits and move beyond them into the untamed country on the other side. I will return here in spite of the river's name; but I will never return the same again, and that, after all, is most clearly what the river says. There is comfort in knowing that no matter what aspect my life takes on, this river will flow freely here, and that I might come to this place any time, in sadness or joy, alone or with someone I love. The waters will run smooth and fast, and though it will be a different river coming down out of the mountains it will also retain its constancy. Whether by snowshoe in winter or a hike in the spring, with canoe paddle, fly rod, or shotgun in the fall—to those who would listen, the river valley is a magic music box. To those who would observe, the pattern of color and movement paint a picture that is a masterwork resulting from millions of years of nature's efforts, yet dynamic and ephemeral. Minnesota is rich with stream and river resources, that beyond economic utility, make up our living environment, delight our senses, and indeed, form and mold our culture. Filthy water cannot be washed. Where can you match the mighty music of their names? — The Monongahela, the Colorado, the Rio Grande the Columbia, the Tennessee, the Hudson (Sweet Thames!); the Kennebec, the Rappahannock, the Delaware, the Penobscot, the Wabash, the Chesapeake, the Swannanoa, the Indian River, the Niagara (Sweet Afton!); the Saint Lawrence, the Susquehanna, the Tombigbee, the Nantahala, the French Broad, the Chattahoochee, the Arizona, and the Potomac (Father Tiber!)—these are a few of their princely names, these are a few of their great, proud, glittering names, fit for the immense and lonely land that they inhabit. And a few others . . . Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am—a reluctant enthusiast . . . a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over those desk-bound men with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. Let us have a splendid legacy for our children . . . let us turn to them and say 'this you inherit and guard it well, for it is far more precious than money . . . and once it is destroyed, nature's beauty cannot be repurchased at any price.' In the 19th century, we devoted our best minds to exploring nature. In the 20th century, we devoted ourselves to controlling and harnessing it. In the 21st century, we must devote ourselves to restoring it. The frog does not drink up the pond in which he lives. I loved the rain as a child. I loved the sound of it on the leaves of trees and roofs and windowpanes and umbrellas and the feel of it on my face and bare legs. I loved the hiss of rubber tires on rainy streets and the flip-flop of windshield wipers. I loved the smell of wet grass and raincoats and shaggy coats of dogs. A rainy day was a special day for me in a sense that no other kind of day was—a day when the ordinariness of things was suspended with ragged skies drifting to the color of pearl and dark streets turning to dark rivers of reflected light and even people transformed somehow as the rain drew them closer by giving them something to think about together, to take common shelter from, to complain of and joke about in ways that made them more like friends than it seemed to me they were on ordinary sunny days. But more than anything, I think, I loved rain for the power it had to make indoors seem snugger and safer and a place to find refuge in from everything outdoors that was un-home, unsafe. I loved rain for making home seem home more deeply. Estuaries are happy land, rich in the continent itself, stirred by the forces of nature like the soup of a French chef; home of myriad forms of life from bacteria an protozoans to grasses and mammals; the nursery, resting place, and refuge of countless things. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. Conservation is a cause that has no end. There is no point at which we will say our work is finished. If I live to be old enough, I may sit down under some bush, the last left in the utilitarian world, and feel thankful that intellect in its march has spared one vestige of the ancient forest for me to die by. He snapped, "I'm the Lorax who speaks for the trees "NOW . . . thanks to your hacking my trees to the ground "They loved living here. But I can't let them stay. "You're glumping the pond where the Humming-Fish hummed! And at that very moment, we heard a loud whack! The Lorax said nothing. Just gave me a glance . . . "But "SO . . . Hast thou named all the birds without a gun; To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty . . . it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.. Let us permit nature to have her way: She understands her business better than we do. It's easy to become hopeless. So people must have hope—the human brain, the resilience of nature, the energy of young people and the sort of inspiration that you see from so many hundreds of people who tackle tasks that are impossible and never give up and succeed. "What do you have when the last bear is gone? And the last wolf?" "I don't know," the young man said. "What?" "Why you have safety; it is safe then to have more farms too poor to support people and more people who cannot live on the farms, and finally you have the tourists who are disappointed because they really came to see the bears." One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. We abuse land because we view it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. We console ourselves with the comfortable fallacy that a single museum piece will do, ignoring the clear dictum of history that a species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all. So Nature deals with us, and takes away Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation? When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life! Wilderness itself is the basis of all our civilization. I wonder if we have enough reverence for life to concede to wilderness the right to live on? While progress should never come to a halt, there are many places it should never come to at all. Leave it as it is . . . The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet. Believe one who knows: You will find something greater in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters. In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create but by what we refuse to destroy. The earth does not belong to any man; Man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood, which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life. He is merely a strand in it. What he does to the web, he does to himself. This we know. If a tree falls in the forest, will you make a sound? Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed, if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails.
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As we were designing a brochure on the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System, we began to collect quotations. We asked people across the country to send us their favorite river quotes. The response was overwhelming. So many people asked for the full list when we were done, that we'd thought we'd share it here. If you use any of these quotes, please be sure to attribute them to the authors. And please, if you have a great quote on rivers, water, or the environment, please send it to us at 