On Waterways

Two interesting takes on waterways, and the large and small ways they impact humankind, have come to my attention recently. In an interview at The Elegant Variation, Chris Abani considers the big picture:

...every great city in the world has usually been situated on the banks of a river. I mean it is the water that draws people to settle there in the first place for obvious reasons – drinking, crop irrigation, transport, etc. Usually the river builds a symbiotic relationship with the city and its inhabitants that is beyond merely the practical, it becomes mythological. We can’t think of Paris without the Seine for instance. There is something about water that does this, its flow, its ability to absorb history, the dead, and the desire of a people. Water is also closely associated with birth and femininity and most rivers and other large bodies of water are linked to goddesses – Yemenya, Oshun, Mami-Wata and so forth. In many ways, you can almost think of the river and stories around it as vital to the city – there is really no London (Londonus) without the Thames, no Shakespeare even. This is the case with LA.

In contrast, Beth Bosworth's nice short story, "Buick" (from the journal Guernica), zeroes in with a much tighter focus, revolving around Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal:

We'd reached Second Avenue and gone beyond, toward the bank of the canal. A garden, renowned for its red roses, had once prospered there in the days when they called it Gowanus Creek Canal, and fish swam into it from the sea. Unlike my father's Buick, we knew, a subterranean propeller, like some mythical underwater beast, had recently come back to life. The canal water now flowed constantly, but its sediment still contained poisonous waste. It still shone a strange shade of pink.

I myself think about rivers and canals quite a bit. I look at the nearly-empty Chicago River, which flows sluggishly past my office building, and strain to imagine how it was once lined with wharves, schooners and steamers scuttling to and fro, the docks swarming with commerce and sweat and human toil. The river is all but ignored now, garnering attention just once a year on St. Patrick's Day, when the city famously dyes it a shocking shade of green.

Joliet, where I now live, has considerably more traffic along its Des Plaines River, mostly barges with pilot houses sufficiently high that the city's five drawbridges have to be raised to let them pass. But the barges never stop here, plodding their way somewhere upriver or downriver: there are no more wharves here either; and the adjacent Illinois & Michigan Canal, once so critical to the 19th Century development of the region, is now little more than a drainage ditch. And Cary, where I grew up, required a quick drive over the Fox River (narrow, shallow and navigable only by speedboats) to get anywhere to the east, which included Chicago and anything else resembling urban civilization.

The Fox has always been sleepy, the I&M has long been irrelevant and invisible, and the Des Plaines still retains a bit of its old bustle, and all of that makes sense to me. But, in a way, the quieting of the Chicago River saddens me. Though I know that the railroads and highways that eclipsed river transport are much more efficient, and the river is considerably cleaner than during its commercial heyday, it still feels like something vital has been lost. It seems like downtown, despite its never-ending flow of pedestrians and cars, is missing something. Maybe, in growing ever more clean and polite and white-collar, it's lost touch with the natural world, from the river around whose marshy mouth the city first arose.

Or maybe I'm just indulging in false nostalgia for better times that really weren't better.