In Your Dreams!

by Dennis Green

“Tired of livin’/but feared of dyin’/that Ole Man River/he just keeps rollin’ along!” Yep, that’ s the same river that rolls past Siddhartha, the same river my Granpa Fred DuVall played on the banks of as a kid growing up in Hannibal, Missouri. Anyone who’s ever lived on or anywhere near the banks of a river knows what I mean, what it does to your sense of time and self.

Not just any large body of water will do. Oceanside living isn’t the same. There’s something relentless about those waves coming in, coming in, still coming in, always coming in — but they’re not as forgiving as a river. All lakes are placid. But Jesus spoke on the bank of the Jordan River many times for a reason.

Humboldt County, where I grew up, is part of the “Six Rivers National Forest,” so named for the six rivers that empty into the ocean nearby — the Trinity, the Smith, the Klamath, the Mad, the Eel and the Van Duzen, (which, like the Elk River, is a tributary of the Eel.) At one time or another, I went trout fishing in most of them, but lived for a time near the banks of the Mad.

Much farther, 20 miles or more upstream, that’s where the “Mad” River gets its name, for up by Cable Bridge and Mount Chaparral, it is not merely angry, but furious. By the time it flows past Blue Lake, where I lived for two years, and went trout fishing with my Dad for many years, it has slowed to a wide, fairly shallow and lazy old man.

So what is it about “Ole Man River” that captures our imagination so? Many such waterways, in fact, are so venerated — the Yallou in China, the Ganges in India, the Nile in Egypt, the Amazon in Brazil — as sacred, living beings. The waters of the Jordan River were used as holy water by John the Baptist, cleansing believers of their sins.

We sense somehow that the River is the source of all our life, not merely for our drinking water and our crops, but its essence so essential to the life force itself. The Source of our fertility, vitality and prosperity. From its headwaters — which may never be in some instances even discovered and explored — springs life eternal.

And this creature, this Spirit, will outlive us. It just keeps rolling along, in benign indifference to our sorrows, our suffering, our loves and losses and joys. “Get a little drunk and you land in jail!”

One summer, I worked briefly in a small stud sawmill in Midway, between Arcata and Blue Lake, on the Mad River, as a “trashpicker,” the lowest, most menial job in the mill. I stood at the junction of two conveyor belts, one bringing raw slabs of lumber off the gang saws, and the other taking good boards down to the planer for finishing. It was my job to toss out all the bad lumber, the split pieces, the strips of bark, the knotted or broken chunks of wood, onto a third conveyor leading to the big burner standing outside the mill.

It was grueling work, and the better I got at it, the longer the day lasted. I remember in my dreams at night seeing a river of lumber flowing across my bed, across my chest, an endless river of wood. And then my girlfriend Chris began visiting my little room, which was in a converted garage behind my parents’ house.

She soothed my aching muscles, and we would put on an album by Sinatra or Johnny Mathis and make love. I told her about my river of lumber dreams, and she said she’d give me something else to remember, “…in your dreams!” And she did.

So…that Old Man River may be made of water, or of wood, and may drive us to distraction, but we never know when we’ll come upon some little island of pleasure in our deliverance downstream. Even Hemingway, so wracked by pain and illness toward the end, found his own little islands in the stream.

©2010 Dennis Green