Headwaters

Oh, how the Texas hills are purple, scattered with green in their gullies. How erosion carves triangles on the land. How the ranges connect and align even though the mountains are far apart. A single mountain, from its perspective, might believe itself alone.

My mother and I, on a slow cross-country journey to see my niece graduate from high school with high honors, came upon the Pecos River on the edge of Nowhere in Texas, high above its canyon. To the north of the high bridge, the Pecos, contained by a canyon’s cliffs, narrowed to a rushing force in its deep, narrow channel. As the canyon widened to the south, the river spread across a wide valley. Ah! the power of water in the American West never came home so strongly. Once we’d crossed that invisible (debatable) line where West meets East in Texas, water clearly and decisively defined the regions of America.

The Pecos, the last river to surprise us, flowed isolated in its splendor, grand in its setting. As we traveled through the Lone Star state, the Rio Grande, which we’d met first in Las Cruces, was always to the south of us, more a presence than a running river. Western rivers are like that, making themselves felt over their vast territory even though you stand in their presence only here and there. The Devil’s River in 
Texas, running turquoise over white limestone, is one I carry in my mind. I can step into its waters at will! The Fremont, in Utah, orange much of the time from the Moenkopi layer through which it runs, runs at the nerve endings of memories I cherish. Such large watersheds these rivers nourish!

Once in Louisiana, and from then on, rivers crossed our path as everyday occurrences. Water was everywhere: farm ponds, chains of lakes, creeks, bayous, and the many broad, slow rivers we knew by name or had never heard of. What an unexpected taking to the heart Louisiana was, where water lends space to land, and we drove on thin webs of earth borrowed from the waterways. Along the Mississippi in New Orleans, we sat on a bench to watch the cargo ships passing the walkway that serves as the city’s front porch.

And so the journey went. We crossed the Ohio, our “home river,” on the drive to visit Pickerington, where I grew up. My hometown had prospered and grown, and the familiar passed by like single cels of a long film we’d never seen before. We passed the yellow brick 12-grade school, now the elementary and one of eleven schools in town, and the tiny church where I was married. At our house on the hill, we were invited in by the owner when she saw us parked in front to give it a close look.

Before we traveled on, we drove three miles to the farm outside the little village, where we’d lived our first several years in Pickerington. No one was home, so we drove back the lane where the school bus had picked me up for elementary school. Oh, how I had loved the creek beyond the barn lot. I thought it a minor Colorado River, far away from the house, where we played and waded beyond any adult eye. As we sat at the end of the long driveway, near the barn and the corn crip and the hay mow where I read all the books of early childhood, I saw, to my amazement, our brook, a mere trickle—the first waterway I ever loved, and a tributary to all the rivers that flowed through my life. It ran close by, near enough for Mother to see us from the kitchen window.

Photographs of Russian River, in flood, near Cloverdale, and the South Branch of the Eel River in Northern California by Luna Zeffer