The Persistence of Rivers: An Essay about Moving Water
By Heide Weidner, May 1, 2018
Heide Weidner. Rev. The Persistence of Rivers: An Essay about Moving Water by Alison Townsend. Orlando, Florida: Burrow Press, 2017.
Near the beginning of her hauntingly beautiful book—The Persistence of Rivers: An Essay about Moving Water—Alison Townsend quotes Wallace Stegner’s evocative lines, “Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which she will see the world afterward” (14). For Townsend the landscape is rivers, large and small, that bind and shape her “with both stillness and fluidity” (8). In often lyrical language, she describes significant passages of her life, and the insights derived from them, as marked by those rivers. For rivers, writes Townsend, “sometimes … tell you who you are” (7). Among the waters that have been speaking to her, I have selected three for a closer look: the Perkiomen in Pennsylvania where she lives for the first five years of her life; the Titicus in New York State, which sees her teenage years; and the Marys River in Oregon that helps her overcome a serious case of depression.
The Perkiomen River, Pennsburg, Pennsylvania: “The Sound of Running Water Began Me” (11)
As an infant, Townsend lives with her parents in an old farmhouse, “The Old House,” on the Perkiomen River. Its sound, her father is wont to say, calms the small child like “a lullaby” (11). But there is more to the power of the running water than easing a toddler to sleep. One day, standing in her crib and looking out at the river below her window, she suddenly experiences an existential shift that will stay with her forever: She knows there is a “here”—the window sill with her stuffed animals –and a “there”—the Perkiomen softly rolling below (13). She also realizes then and for the rest of her life: she is alone but not lonely (14).
A few years later, Townsend’s family moves to a house farther away from the Perkiomen. But the river, now “just down the road” (17), still shares her life. She explores it during summer and winter outings with her siblings, a small dog, and her mother. The river is shallow, good for wading and exploring. While her mother sketches, the child she is then dips her face into the water. A face looks back, her face but not quite her face, and all of a sudden “something twisted and turned in my body and seemed to float away, merging with the water and sky” (19). She feels real and unreal at the same time. Later, the death and burial of the puppy, and her mother’s unstoppable tears, force her to realize that nothing is invincible and nothing stays the same. She observes the river change with the seasons—light-speckled summer currents turn into an icy “illustration from The Snow Queen” (21)—and life ends in death. Suddenly something is “there and not there” (21), a change that fills her with forebodings and perhaps foreshadows her mother’s illness and early death. When the family leaves Wild Run Farm, Townsend, age nine, looks back, with “loss settling inside me, a quiet presence that would inhabit me forever”(23).
Titicus River, North Salem, New York: This River “Raised Me and Helped Me Endure” (8)
Townsend is twelve before she lives on a river again. Her family—now with a stepmother and step siblings—moves to North Salem, a small town with a river, the Titicus, that snakes “through the township like a snip of blue ribbon” (27). She describes the river as “dark and secretive, as filled with mystery as the inside of [her] rapidly changing body” (28). Once a fisherman startles her by the bridge over the river. He speaks to her as if she were an adult and pulls her suddenly out of her teenage life, while the river below runs through every part of her body as they talk. She meets the neighbor’s daughter, Nan, and they become friends. First their free time is spent swimming in the neighbor’s pond, but feeling the “irresistible pull” (32) of the river that runs through it, they row an old boat upriver and into the hot summer afternoons. She meets a boy on one of those dream-like days, but while her memories of him are as fluid as the river’s waters, she knows that she was aching “for him as we can only ache “for things we have not yet experienced but which our bodies somehow already know” (35).
Marys River, Wren, Oregon: This River “Healed Me, Giving Me Back to Myself” (9)
Having grown up on the high plains, in a tiny hamlet in southern Germany, I hear Townsend when she writes at the beginning of this section, “[T]here are landscapes in our lives that work on us as if we are part of the land itself, shaping us, scraping us, refining us, making us into more of who we really are” (50). Some of them, Townsend continues, “seem a country we have always known, a place we can step into and feel immediately part of” (50). For Townsend such a place is the Marys River in Oregon. She moves there with her husband after a nervous breakdown, “a more than ordinary sadness” (52) going back to the death of her mother. The Marys River, which carries her mother’s name and feels like her mother’s “heart beat” (55), forms the boundaries of their new place. Wading into the river, “walking through water” (59), is like a baptism for Townsend that washes away “all fear and anxiety” (59) and re-connects her to her childhood on the Perkiomen. Living beside and through the Marys River, Townsend experiences “a time without words” that leads her out of her sadness into a place of healing. When she and her husband have to leave the river, she fears she may not survive without it. Yet she takes its lesson into the years and rivers to come: see the world as a child; move with life; align yourself with beauty; and follow the promise of renewal and rebirth that rivers teach you.
In addition to The Persistence of Rivers, Alison Townsend is the author of two books of poetry, The Blue Dress: Poems and Prose Poems, and Persephone in America, and two poetry chapbooks, And Still the Music, and What the Body Knows. Her writing has won a Pushcart Prize, The Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition, a Wisconsin Literary Arts Grant, and many other awards. Her poetry has appeared widely and is anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2006 and Pushcart Prize XXIV. Recent essays have appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, Chautauqua, Crab Orchard Review, The Southern Review, and Water-Stone Review. Her essays have been listed as notable in The Best American Essays three times. Professor Emerita of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, she lives in the farm country outside Madison. Her full-length essay collection, Nature Girl: Body, Memory, and the Landscapes of Home, seeks a publisher.
