So Many Rivers

            Just got home from holiday visiting that took me over the Acosta and Buckman Bridges. So rivers are on my mind. I have never been with out “Water, water, everywhere." I would not know what to do I were ever land-locked.

• When I was a child, my family would spend the occasional afternoon playing on the “beach” of the Danvers River. Not really a beach in the Florida sense of the word, more like a half-a-football-field area of carted-in sand that had been scraped together to give the illusion of beach.
• When I was a Girl Scout, I went canoeing on the edges of the Ipswich River after I hiked to it. My initial canoe experience was indelible – I have never forgotten the scared/excited feeling that coursed through me as the “boat” tilted so easily when I first stepped in, then turned around to face my partner. I was used to boats that didn’t waver with every movement. Canoes still make me jittery.
• I have walked atop the levees of the lower slow-moving Mississippi. And, once for two days in 1966, sandbagged levees in Illinois while Ole Man River surged past carrying trees, houses, boats, cars and the detritus of the winter floods and rains down to the Delta.
•  I live only a few miles from a major waterway - the St. Johns River. I have boated on it in several different outboards, snorkeled its bank while playing with manatee, fished its depths, dived its edges, spent the night on it in a houseboat, used a fish-finder sonar to see the remains of the docking poles used by the PBY Flying Boats that were part of the Navy fleet assigned to NAS Jax in WWII, and watched from a dredge as historians brought up proof of the Confederate gunboat “lost” in the quagmire of its floor.
•  I have scuba dived in the Itchetucknee River as a part of a Florida Department of Fish and Game clean up.
• I have splashed in the Saco and Piscataqua Rivers, chilly even in August.
• I have been swimming in the Matanzas just below a Spanish Conquistador fort made of cannon shell-absorbing coquina. 
• I have thrown rocks into the Potomac while Mt. Vernon stood guard on the bluff above me.
• I have sat on the banks of the Weisse Lutschinethe reading Tolkien and wishing I could have been there with him when he painted his watercolors of Rivendell and imagined Gandalf flooding the Bruinen to demolish the Ring-Wraiths.
• I have slipped on the rocks below the Skunk River dam, visible only during the dry season.
• I have watched scullers on the Charles while the Pops played in the Hatch Shell.
• I have stared into the Seine just below the Ile de la Cite and thought about who else had walked the bridge and stood in the same spot.
•  I have white-water rafted on the Ocoee and the Nantahala during bonding experiences with my sister Nancy and her Wild Women friends.
•  I have stood quietly on the bow of a Rhine-steamer listening (in vain, alas) with all my heart and both my ears for the siren song of the Lorelei as the rock came into view around the bend of the river.
• I once tossed a small bouquet into the Avon in memory of the Bard.
•  I have punted on the Cam.
•  I had been in London less than a week when I fell for the lure of the Thames.  My room in Vincent Square was near the river and I walked along the Chelsea and Victoria Embankments daily. I never saw the sun rise over Parliament, but I watched more than a dozen sunsets over Battersea. I knew the river had gotten to me when, rather than drive 30 minutes to Richmond to tour Hampton Court Palace, I opted for the river road. I spent 3.5 hours on a cold, drizzly, dank morning:  watching the weirs flood, sitting in the locks, smelling the river. Loving life.

The water part of my Bucket List includes the Nile, the Pecos, the Orinoco, the Snake, the Liffey, the Amazon, the Colorado, the Yangzte, the Zambezi and the Euphrates. So, I feel for Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner’s frustration with the expanse of undrinkable water surrounding him. My frustration is almost as great – so many rivers, so little time.