When I was a young buck I worked at a biological research station located along the eastern continental divide in the western mountains of Virginia. After a night a drinking cheap warm beer, which was all a starving research biologist had access to, I could choose which watershed I contributed to when nature called. Depending on which direction I stumbled away from my cabin I could piss in the watershed that led west to the New River and eventually the Gulf of Mexico or the James River which led east and eventually to the Pacific Ocean. It is a mighty bit of empowerment knowing you can send your piss in vastly different directions simply by walking a few meters one way or the other. Pissing in the woods along a divide for a few summers has colored the way I think about my responsibility to water forever.
If you were to take a topographic map of anywhere on the planet and remove every bit of information but for the lines indicating rivulets, creeks, streams, and rivers you would end up with a map that for all the world looked exactly like the capillaries and veins that map our bodies. We are rivers. And because we move about, we are different rivers depending on where we happen to wander. It is easy to sit along the banks of a river and dream about where the current leads. It is a different thing to realize that we are that river, and we too have a current leading us somewhere. We inhale, taking the moist air into our lungs-and we breathe out, returning our vapors to the atmosphere that will somewhere soon condense into clouds that spill their guts on a farm field in Indiana. We become corn. We drink bourbon made from that corn, along with water from creeks in the knob lands ringing the bluegrass of Kentucky and we tell tales around a campfire that sends the last remaining bits of wood bound moisture rising with the smoke. We become epic tales that define us. We eat a peach brought to us by a friend returning from a trip down south and we become an Alabama thunderstorm. What defines us, literally, is water.
At various times in my life, I have been the New River and the James. I identify as Beargrass Creek but I have also been Wakulla and Wacissa and Ochlockonee – all in a single day. I have been the Black Vermillion, the Cottonwood, the Colorado, the Price, the Winnipeg. I nearly froze in a little creek called Salt Branch. I flipped a canoe in the Rolling Fork. I visited the Rhine and the Seine. One time I kedged a drop keel sailboat from the Caribbean into the Sittee. For a spell I lived in a wood frame farmhouse with Rhody and Hattie. We didn’t have electricity so from late spring through early fall we would bathe in Little Walker. Sometimes we would brave a late fall cold snap by breaking a thin layer of ice to take a quick wash off. Then we would scramble naked up the hill to huddle around the Warm Morning wood stove. We would get our damp bodies inches from the hot metal and watch the steam rise from us and be carried off to become a future snow fall.
When people ask me what I do I am tempted to say, “I haul water” and leave it at that. If they ask me where I live, I’ll name a creek. I want to go back in time and chronicle every spring, stream, or farm pond I’ve skinny dipped in because that is my lineage. I come from a long line of rivers and puddles. Water is my ancient self and my right-this-minute me. And speaking of just this minute - I think I’ll drink a cold local craft beer because I am no longer a starving biologist. When the time comes to release that beer to the world, I will do that standing in my garden. I will be Beargrass Creek, Ohio River, Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico. When we come to realize we are rivers we become mighty.