The River

The neighborhood I grew up in is a few blocks away from the Des Moines River, on a hill overlooking the valley the river carved. The river is somewhat tame now because there is a reservoir and dam to prevent flooding in the capital city below, which works about half of the time there are the “500 year” floods. So it was to this river that we neighborhood kids fished from, swam in, boated on and roamed around. Down at the river we would endure the bugs and snakes, catch huge carp, build rafts and forts, light campfires on the sandbars, and the bravest among us would jump from the top of the train trestle into the water below. There were usually homeless people living in makeshift camps in the surrounding woods, but they never bothered us. They would come and go but the river was always there, making its way along the the same old course, trees hanging over it and the sun shining through them, coloring the water dark green in the summer. The thick cottonwood trees would shed their seeds and the wind would blow a white fluffy storm everywhere, clouding the surface of the water and covering the grass. Sometimes the river was raging in flood, other times meandering in drought. In the winter it took on a different kind of beauty, framed by the black and white of the surrounding trees and showing the hundreds of animal tracks left in the snow crossing the frozen river. The experience of growing up around water can last a lifetime, be it a creek, a pond, a river, a lake, an ocean. Whether it pools up, flows, or comes in waves, it is one of the life givers, and you know it and love it like the sun and earth and sky.