Rivers

I have only seen four Irish rivers, and they have all been in cities, something strange and violent in their aspect as they rush brutally through inflicted channels of stone, confined to single-file paths as the people mill on their banks, completely ignorant of the vicious force turning in hard pulls and whorls just a few feet from their vantage.

It’s especially exhilarating when standing on a bridge. I walk the Banks of the Lee each morning in part because I get to cross the river three times, once seeing it pushed into the straight canal that takes it through the city, again as it flows in its own natural mud banks, and a third time as the other fork is taken along the edge of campus and channeled between the stone- but somehow still pitifully weak looking- arches of the campus bridges.

There are tides to it, and when the tide is high and it is raining it always appears to me that surely, this time, those stone arches will fail and the water will pour over the walkway in a torrent and then the incautious walkers will remember the dragon they live with, this River.

How do you confine a river to such deep paths? I wonder as I examine the brick-laid walls that plunge into the muddy churn. Near certain bridges, older ones wide enough for cars to cross, there are sets of stairs that dip into the water and disappear beneath it, ending where? What or who would walk into that water? It is not a pleasantly weaving body, it has no beaches or sandy banks. Maybe at one time it did, before it was made to work like an ox here on its way to the sea.

The Shannon and the Abbey are like it, and even the Corrib in Galway as it flows into the bay. The first time I crossed the Corrib it was late at night and you could see the harbor lights reflecting in the distance, little orange orbs on a mat of dark, and it was noise and white caps churning to be free from the strains of Galway city before settling into the calm, dark, wide bay.

We stood on the edge of it and watched it foam under the bridges, becoming filled with deep, rough eddies from the arches, and we tossed in a paper airplane that caught up in the shrubs climbing up the stone before falling into a whirlpool and being devoured.

Have I seen an American river in this way? I have seen them in the forest as they lap their flat banks. I have seen them plunge and thrash through gorges. Have I seen them thus run into channels? I have never lived around one long enough to know. I am getting to know the Lee a little better.