Rivers like Stories, Like Words, Like Books

"In graphic design, the word “river” refers to the white space between words that sometimes connects in a rippling vertical pattern down the printed page. Such a river is to be avoided because it can interrupt the flow of text in an irregular pattern and distract the reader’s eye from the horizontal progression of the printed words. But just as it may be a distraction, that space between words also confirms their meaning. If a river can both separate and connect on the printed page, it is capable of doing this all the more in the natural world.

"If this river were a book, it would be dense, obscure, difficult to read. Some rivers have a brilliant clarity; they are translucent, quick, clear about themselves and where they are going and where they are taking you. Others, like the Hudson, have a thickness and opacity, as if there were too much type on the page to take it all in. The pages are long and packed with intricate information, and even at the end of the page, you may not be quite sure of what you’ve read. Its narrative begins as a lake on the side of Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks, and the clear mountain stream running from it ends up as a tidal channel in the Atlantic Ocean. Its character, never fixed, is transformed during its passage from freshwater to saline, from a thin, winding stream to a broad, straight channel. It has a tide and a current, and it flows both ways; sometimes it flows both ways at once.

"Intimacy with the river, like other kinds of intimacy, is laced with ambiguity, with questions of ownership elusive and variable. And it becomes an easy thing to imagine yourself a particle in the river’s continuity, so easy, in fact, that you begin to see things the way the river might see them. And you see, then, how that continuity can be reassuring. You somehow go through life to a certain point always thinking that even if you can’t exactly start over, at least you can fix things or change them and that all the missteps and wrong directions can be corrected and that it is never too late. Later you may find yourself believing that is no longer true. I looked up the river and down it. Its flow was certain, its direction unchangeable, but still it could take on the day’s nuances of light, the vagaries of the shifting tide.

From "Just Beneath the Surface" by Akiko Busch