Reading Our Region

Essays from a Regional Writer

Susan Charkes enjoys hearing and telling stories, especially those involving the environment, farming, and sustainability in our region. Discover her poetic view of the outdoors and be inspired to visit the places she describes. Learn more about Susan, her writing, and even hear her podcasts at www.susancharkes.com.

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Along the riverrun

by Susan Charkes

We live in the midst of a great conversation that we call the Delaware Valley. To hear it, float down the river that gives its name to our region.

The Delaware River begins in Hancock, New York, where its East and West branches converge (an area known to its inhabitants, oddly enough, as “the” Delaware Valley). For the next 330 miles, until it empties into the Delaware Bay at Cape May Point, the river encounters no dams or other impoundments. Thus, although many of its 216 tributaries (as well as both of its originating branches) are checked by reservoirs, and although must pass around obstructions such as wing dams and bridge abutments, the Delaware lays claim to be the longest free-flowing river east of the Mississippi (the Yellowstone, its western counterpart, is twice as long).

The general shape of its course is familiar to anyone who, having attended grade school in Pennsylvania, was taught to draw a state map bordered on the east with a pair of vertical waves. The first of these waves crests at Matamoras, PA, where the river makes a right-angle turn to follow the edge of the Allegheny Front along a finger of Blue Mountain.

Hello, I must be going, says River to Rock.

I’ll be here when you get back, says Rock to River.

The second wave crests at Pennsbury, where the Proprietor built a house high on the riverbank, looking back toward his homeland. The trough between these two waves is the south-tending course that begins at Easton and ends at Durham. It is here, as it enters Bucks County, that the river makes a decisive turn as it meets an impassable wall of diabase rock, the product of an ancient volcano. This was lava that ran like water.

I pity you, says River to Rock. Once, you could glide over the Earth, like me, making your own way. Now, you are stuck here, receiving visitors, waiting for news. Oh, says Rock to River, your time will come. You will slow, you will harden, you will witness the future passing in front of you and floating away, just beyond your reach.

As if bowing in deference, the river alters its course here, bending to run nearly due east until the diabase disappears. Then it wends its way back. By the time it reaches Erwinna, the river is once again heading south. From here to Point Pleasant it is a broad, shallow reach, possessed of a steady, sure current, and cradled by tree-covered undeveloped shorelines. The Trenton “Falls” – rocky shoals – form a natural barrier to commercial traffic upstream. All in all, then, this is a fine stretch for an afternoon of kayaking.

Today the river is clear enough to watch the cobbled bottom unwind below our boats like a nubbly ribbon. Occasionally, huge flat submerged boulders reveal their existence by coaxing a subtle change in the river’s surface texture: from diffusely calm to tautly smooth. The wide sky and the wide water reflect the hot sun; cool refreshing water spritzes from our circling paddles. Now high red shale formations tower over us on the New Jersey side…Devil’s Tea Table, Tumble Falls. The rocks are deeply incised with ledges; each layer is the bed of a primeval inland waterway. The passage of time is caught in the physical structure of the rocks. Below the rocks, the river passes, endlessly passing, always current, always now. Yet the water we float on was just someone else’s now, someone far upstream. And soon it will be someone else’s now, downstream.

River cannot bear to pass by Rock without taking a bit along. So Rock flows, crumb by crumb, downstream, into the future. Sometimes River is too ambitious, breaking off larger chunks of Rock than River can bear away. These big pieces of Rock sojourn in the River, and they make the River sing. The song is a shooshroar. River gets to stop, and leap high in the air like Rock does in its cliffs and ledges. Rock stands aloof, watching. It was young once, and mud. Full of teeming life that slipped and crawled and scuttled, and which left its footprints, its shells and its skeletons in Rock so Rock could remember what it was like when water was high, and Rock was low.

So far, the wind has laid low; now a chill breeze begins to blow against the current, rippling the river surface in lines perpendicular to the banks. A wash of gray clouds, uniform, flat and gray, like a screenful of lint, advances from the southwest. Drumroll, lights, action. The first raindrops feel like spray, ignorable. Then spattering, noise like sizzling oil as they accelerate and the storm drives in. To the shore! Lifeless, timeless, reliable rock.

Sky says, you, River, I know you. You have left fragments of yourself with me. I thank you for the gift of time, and I return them to you. And Sky sings, with a barkclang, of its return of River’s gift.

The rain is cold. It pours down for fifteen minutes; we are drenched to the skin. But it is only water. And afterwards when we put in again, the river is warm. Why is rain cool and River warm?

No says Sky, you have it wrong. I am cool, cool blue, and River brings me warmth of the sun.

Rock is still. Rock has known warmth, a long time ago.

River says, hello, I must be going.