River in the Blood
Painting by Hank Feeley
By Mike Delp
Sun contributor
Stand close by the banks of the Crystal River and try to convince me that it was not put down millennia ago by an alchemist, some ancient madman who melted down tons of goblets, and made them into something liquid and cold, and somehow managed to transform them into this lovely river. I prefer myth to science most of the time, and know full well the glacial forces which shaped Michigan and laid down the bed of the Crystal. I know where rivers come from and where they go; that they have their own individual lives and that they carry the watery blood keeping all of us alive. Give me a river and a fly rod and I will let go of everything deemed important by most others and disappear into the brush to find a brook trout, or a brown … any finned creature which looks like it came from the stars.
I first came to the Crystal as a teenager, hell-bent on living up north for a summer, working at the Homestead and living at a friend’s cottage on Lake Michigan. We drank coffee at the small cafe in town, 15 cents a cup and then went back to the cottage and used our garage sale to buy surfboards for the big storm waves off Sleeping Bear. I saw the river then as an addendum to a lovely, quiet place, an entity unto itself wandering through Glen Arbor. I grew up on a lake and had a boat when I was 8, learned to fish for bass and bluegills with my father, then fell into my hormonal rage at 16 and pretty much stopped fishing altogether to chase a cheerleader girlfriend. My summer at the Homestead lasted two weeks, lost to the dual demons of homesickness and lovesickness. I drove back home but could not get the Crystal out of my dreams.
Some nights I woke, or half-woke and imagined it flowing directly through me, all that water clear as glass doing its magic on tiny psychic knots I had tied inside myself like so many snares. I dreamed myself in the clear stream of it, working against the easy current, lying down, head just above water, and letting the river work loose all I had managed to tighten down: a different summer job working in a tool and die factory as a janitor, a girlfriend suddenly gone to Gun Lake for weeks at a time, and weeks of lolling around town listening to the Beach Boys with a surfboard tied to the roof of an old Jeep … cruising town like surfers, or so we thought. What I learned that aching summer: put a psychic knot in a river as you would a pebble and it disappears. Over time, water is the great healer, the great scouring pad of the imagination.
I forgot the Crystal for a time. I went off to college, started fishing seriously again and then took a job and came north for what I now realize was the single most important decision I have ever made: to move toward rivers. I lived and fished the AuSable in Grayling for 13 years, then took the leap to direct the Creative Writing Program at the Interlochen Arts Academy. In that first Interlochen year, 1984, I went back to the Crystal to salmon fish with my dear friend and fellow raconteur, the wondrous attorney and legal shaman, Dean Robb.
The river had not changed, save for a few businesses, and I saw it then again as I see it now … a pure, almost isolated piece of the world which tells us what it means to be a river. I go back often to the clear memory of that salmon fishing day. I had never seen a salmon in a river, much less one in the Crystal. There, in water so clear it seemed invisible, I watched hundreds of salmon crowding upriver, fanning gravel, surging, and then that old magic of rivers started in: rivers are not rivers after all, but soul magnifiers. Watch hundreds of salmon under the lens of a clear river and you watch the literal meaning of what it means to be alive and dying at the same time. I sat on the bank and felt my head disappear, while upstream I could hear Dean shouting about all the fish he was seeing.
I sat for perhaps a half hour, musing, letting myself trail off with the river, with no intention of fishing. And then, call it luck or some kind of ascent from whatever gods are the caretakers of small, lovely rivers, and I saw something large and slow moving upstream. At first it was as if a soft wave were pushing upriver, and then it rose higher, and something quite like a Jules Verne spaceship slipped past … a four foot Sturgeon within an arm’s length brushed against my boot tip and I was transported. I lay down my rod and put my head in my hands and mumbled something I’ve long forgotten. Looking back, I recall it now as something akin to prayer, but not quite.
Bob Dylan reminds us in a line, “ʻlotta water under the bridge, ʻlotta other stuff too”, and I see that day as a way a force outside of myself sent a creature I had never seen to take up residence in my imagination, where it still lives today. I make a habit, no I make a devotion of taking in rivers I love, rivers I’ve fished, building secret streams inside me. I go where they are, locked into distant memories when I need places to escape a world gone over to digital information and 3-D fantasy. All that “other stuff” Dylan spoke of is in there too, and when I step into one of these memory rivers, I get to see that “other stuff” flow past. Sometimes I pick it up like so much emotional debris and roll it over in my hands, but most times, I just let it go past, the river a dream pump telling us we don’t die, that the water in us is coming back.
Meanwhile, here at my desk, with October here, rivers about to shut down for the winter and the Crystal is one of those sweet, clean branches of memory water that shines with light, clouds, a lens revealing a heart I hope continues to be made almost entirely of water. It rises and falls in my imagination, meandering through the dark nights of December through March. And those salmon, long since dead, exhausted from spawning, they have left their own heart particles there. What a reminder of what to do with each day, watching them churn and roll, only to return back to the river, become river. Well over a hundred years ago, Walt Whitman wrote:
“I bequeath myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again, look for me under your boot soles.”
All fine for Whitman, but give me water over dirt any time. You won’t find me in the till, or up on the bank. I want to be water itself, alive and thrashing, mixing in the wild atoms sluicing downstream.
