SITTING BY THE RIVER by Susan Fox Rogers
There are some things I do not like to do alone. Watch movies, either in a theater or at home. Attend a concert. Eat a delicious dinner. Sit by the river. But there I was on March 23, 2007, alone on a half-damp log on the banks of the Hudson River.
There was not a cloud over the river, leaving a dome of blue. Over the Catskills, clouds bunched, the mountains a herd of sleeping purple camels. Quite simply it was beautiful.
It had been a while since I had been on the river. I had stopped paddling in October when I discovered a bone spur in my neck. I had been limping along in pain, with almost constant headaches. Heaving a boat around seemed a bad idea, so I took to exploring by car.
My father visited one weekend and we drove up to Olana, Frederic Church’s house high above the river. When we stepped out of the car my father took one look at the richly ornate house and said with a sigh, “Oh, shit.” We wandered Harvey Fite’s fantastic Opus 40, where he had a lifetime of rocks stacked into beautiful formations. And we visited the monasteries along the river, walking the empty, airy hallways of Mount St. Alphonsus.
Despite the fun of our weekend together something had happened to me without the river. For one thing, I had lots of time. Lots. I cleaned my basement, threw away clothes that should have been tossed years ago. My silver spoons were polished. The baseboard radiator was stripped of dust. In other words, I was bored out of my mind.
And in this boredom something awful had developed. I stopped seeing the world. I no longer noticed the wind or the color of the sky as vividly as I did when I imagined I could be on the water. On the water, I am alert – to wind, to the shift in temperatures that mean rain, to the color of the world. And in this alert state I see Canada geese migrating and monarch butterflies and flowers trying to push forth their final colors. I realized that paddling had trained me to see the world, because on the water seeing matters.
When I try and explain to people that my paddling is about living, this is what I mean: going out onto the river is about staying alert to the richness of the world. It’s about seeing and marveling at the world, it’s about being alive.
So as spring rolled in, I was ready to go onto the river again.
Forty feet out, ice chunks moved north, while flotillas of ice clustered near shore, swirling with the grace of elephants. The current was shifting. The water near shore changes direction first, followed by the deeper water mid-river. I know this from paddling, how those currents near shore have unexpectedly pushed me the wrong direction. But knowing something and seeing something is different. I know there are currents but I don’t see them unless a stick is tossed in the water or ice dances north or south. It’s like knowing the wind and seeing the wind, how it shuffles tree branches and raises dust. It’s like knowing love and seeing love tucked into a delicious meal.
The floes took on shapes so that as I sat on shore I saw creatures. An otter on a floe. A fox. A beaver riding a chunk of ice.
I was half carefree, my bottom damp and a bit cold. What had revived me after the fall was a January cross-country trip to Arizona with my father. We stopped in Danville, Kentucky, to visit my grandparents’ graves, to look at “grandmother’s house” on Mildred Court and at the Fox home. We drove past the farm where my father had spent many of his summers, and the changes made him wish we had not. I heard my father’s voice become animated, his face a thousand expressions. The Blue Ridge Mountains were full of family stories, of George Rogers Clark scalped in the Revolutionary War. He loved his roots there, the Foxes who owned land and the Gists who were lawyers. All of this was our land, though we did not live there any longer.
As we veered off the road to visit places with names like Pinch (I asked him, echoing my childhood: Inchme and Pinchme go out in a boat. Inchme falls in and who is left?), Enterprise, and Alice (the name of my niece) just because we could and it pleased us. We both had a keen awareness that my mother never would have enjoyed this trip. The car made her sleepy, and her curiosity was not for views of the Gulf Coast, rows of FEMA trailers outside of New Orleans or billboards about God, but for people. My father and I missed her but we both, in different ways, were seeing how life goes on.
We were intoxicated by our journey. In every town my father sniffed out the used bookstores while I went on long walks. We spent Christmas with old friends near Chattanooga – Jeanine Peterson, alone without her husband Don, had introduced my parents in 1956 in Iowa City. We stopped to eat oysters in New Orleans and in Texas to see whooping cranes.
We crossed many rivers – the Ohio and Mississippi, looked down on the Tennessee River from atop Signal Mountain outside of Chattanooga. We wandered beside the Rio Grande in Texas. They are all lovely rivers, but it was clear the Hudson was the only river for me.
In Arizona we continued to comb used bookstores, but we also walked into Sabino Canyon to picnic, watched old movies and enjoyed my father’s new skills in the kitchen. He had learned to whip up a great stir-fry, and one day I returned from a daylong hike to find short ribs in the oven.
My father had driven home from Arizona alone while I flew back. Every day he called in with progress on his trip: a stop at the Lonesome Dove bookstore in Texas where he acquired a few more boxes of books; a stop in St. Louis to see his cousin Anne, whom he found living on oxygen. He drove through snow and storms and I could tell he felt heroic by the end of the trip.
Now I was looking forward to the summer, to a different heat than the heat of the desert. I wanted to organize the summer around the river, exploring the upper reaches of the Hudson or the tributaries, especially the Rondout that runs out by Kingston. I had paddled a ways into the Rondout back in August on the anniversary of my mother’s death, and the odd boats in the hidden marinas intrigued me. I wanted to loiter in Ramshorn Marsh and learn the birds there. Maybe I would paddle the length of the river in one push. Once again I felt I could do anything. How fast that changes.
My father would die in nine days. I did not know this, of course, as I sat there so content in the sun by the river. I was innocent, imagining that I had all the time in the world to plan my little outings, and that was all that mattered. The river feeds that illusion, moving back and forth in its regular extended heartbeat. Rivers serve many purposes and this is one, to give the sense of eternity. After all, the Tigris and Euphrates that issue from the Garden of Eden still flow. I imagined my father would live as long as the river.
I want to revisit those nine days between sitting by the river and the moment on Sunday morning when, still in my pajamas, I was collecting my New York Times bundled in its blue plastic sleeve and a sheriff pulled in front of my house. He backed up and tucked into the driveway. My first thought was what I had done wrong?
“Is this the Rogers residence?” he asked.
I nodded, my breath catching.
“I have bad news about your father in Central Pennsylvania.”
At those words, my legs gave out beneath me. The sheriff crouched and gathered me up, half-carrying me into the house.
He sat with me for a while, then asked, “Isn’t there someone I can call to come sit with you?” There was no one to call, my sister far away in France.
There is a difference between hearing death and knowing death. I heard what the sheriff said but I needed to call the hospital there in State College. “Are you sure it’s Thomas Rogers?” I asked. And I still didn’t believe it. I wanted to see the body, to touch his cold, hard cheek, see his long form stretched out, unmoving. And still, I do not know death.
What happened to the river in those nine days between when I sat there watching it flow by and the day my father died? The ice cleared out. The water flowed by. It accepted some garbage and left some on shore.
What did I do? I taught classes. I ate breakfast. I walked to the river, wrote emails. I put my boat in the water for the first time for the season. There was excitement and trepidation, slick in a wetsuit, the water so cold it took my breath away. Paddling north then south my body eased into the regular motion, accepted the ache in my lower back. The freedom I find only on the river spread before me. All of this I recall in broad swatches. But the other minutes of other hours of those other nine days, little stands out in detail. Pay attention to every day, every minute, I push myself. It might be your last.
I remember but one moment vividly in those nine days. I called my father near ten at night on March 31. There was no reason for the call except I wanted to hear his voice. He sounded low, sitting there in his study at his large leather-topped desk playing solitaire. His cousin Anne had died and that depressed him. He was tired from too many hours of gardening, the tulips already in bloom. Soon, though, we were both laughing, as we so often did.
“You’ve cheered me up,” he said.
I will always hear his voice flecked with a bit of lightness, the texture of his laugh. I cheered him up on the night before he died.
And then the next morning he woke, knew that his heart was not ticking properly. He packed his toilet kit with his medications, slipped on his grey-blue parka we had bought together. Was he frightened as he drove toward the hospital? This is what haunts me. The image of my father grasping the steering wheel of his little Mazda with both hands, a bit hunched over, urging the car forward, hoping to get to safety on time. He felt his heart beating erratically, hesitating until it gave one final push, flailed, expired. His car veered off the road. He was two minutes from the hospital. At 7:15 he was dead.
I have much to learn about death, but what I know right away is this. Mother and father both gone, alone takes on new meaning. What I had felt as alone in the past was but a shadow. This alone was not just an emotion, it defied gravity. I anchored myself in this world through my parents. Without them, I would sit through movies, concerts, and good meals alone. I would sit by the river alone.
Susan Fox Rogers is the author of Antarctica: Life on the Ice (Travelers’ Tales, 2007). Her recent essays have appeared in Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing, Under the Sun, and in the anthology A River’s Pleasure (Pace University Press).