Twists and Turns Ahead

“Sorry Star Dust, no diesel here. There’s only 3 to 4 feet at the fuel dock.  The river is five feet lower than normal. Try Polestar Marina, past the next lock. The river’s forming a new path and this marina is being left high and dry.”

Since we left the Great Lakes, Star Dust had been learning a lot about rivers.  Leaving the clear blue waters of Lake Michigan, she has entered progressively darker waterways: the Chicago River, the Chicago Ship Canal, the Des Plaines River, the Illinois River, and the Dardenne Slough.  Just one, half-moon curve above St Louis, she is taking a break before heading down the lower Mississippi to the Kaskaskia and Ohio Rivers to Kentucky, where she will wait out hurricane season.

Knowing that my life is shifting soon to land, I will miss Star Dust, as well as these ever-changing, always curving rivers.  Surrendering to the whims of wind, floods, and time, rivers roll from one valley to the next, cutting new paths as they go. When rivers find obstacles, they find a way around them. They never look back and never give up.  They keep at it, becoming more powerful and capable as they go.

Swift and Sure

Boosted by currents, Star Dust has traveled fast and made peace (if not friends) with 600-ft-long tug barges along the way. Traversing locks, skirting dams and anchoring where she feels safe, Star Dust has passed her Rivers 101 exam, and is mentally preparing  for one of the swiftest rivers ahead.  

Growing up in Missouri and steeped in Mark Twain, these rivers have nurtured my childhood memories, and strangely, I look forward to the portion of the Loop touted as the hardest part of the 6,000-mile journey: the Mississippi River. It’s been larger than life since I could pronounce it, and so hard to spell that I still sing it in rhyme every time I type it here.  M-I-S, S-I-S, S-I-P-P-I.  Jockeying Star Dust around floating logs, I think of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn rafting that long stretch, careening from one adventure to the next.  I feel sentimental and happy that I get to know this famous and ever-changing body of water on this last leg of our Great Loop voyage.  Choked up as I think about our voyage coming to end, I share this poem that helped me realize there is no reason to cling to the past.  Like the river, there will be new twists and turns and adventures ahead. 

The River Cannot Go Back

They say before entering the sea,

a river trembles with fear.

She looks back at the way

that she has travelled, from the peaks,

the mountains, the long winding road

which crosses forests and villages,

and sees in front of her such a vast ocean

that entering it doesn't seem anything else

than having to disappear forever.

But there's no other way.

The river can't go back.

No one can go back.

Going back is impossible in existence.

The river needs to take the risk

and to enter the ocean.

It's only when entering the ocean

that fear will disappear,

because it's only then

that the river will know it's not about

to disappear into the ocean,

but to become ocean.

- Khalil Gibran