Wild and Scenic: Golden!

This year is the 50th Anniversary of the establishment of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and the designation of the Namekagon and St. Croix Rivers as the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway. One of many wonderful aspects of where we live is that we're on the western edge of the St. Croix watershed. Our property is a couple of miles downstream of the Sunrise River, a tributary of the St. Croix.

Wild and Scenic 50th Logo

Several years ago we started a writing and photography project focused on the Scenic St. Croix. We never finished that project. This year it's time to take another crack at it. We're going to share some of the resources we've discovered in the interval.

Recently we've been trying to find any existing anthologies of river poetry. We've only found one that we're sure of, The River's Voice: An Anthology of Poetry. From the reading that we've done over the past few years, we think there's numerous other poems that warrant inclusion or a separate volume. We're going to see how far we can get toward an augmented anthology without actually trying to get permissions and get anything (re)published. At least, that's the plan for now.

canoeing on the St. Croix

Photo by J. Harrington

Craig Blacklock has crafted a series of photographs of the St. Croix and Namekagon, accompanied by an essay written by Walter Mondale and published as The Enduring Gift. There's an unrelated Wild and Scenic Rivers web site that has a compilation of river quotes that we will soon start wading through.

Part of our inspiration comes from an English web site we've discovered, Caught by the River. The English seem to have more excellent poets writing about their rivers than we former colonists have writing about ours. We've recently read Alice Oswald's A Sleepwalk on the Severn and Dart, each a book length work devoted to one river. On our side of "the big pond," we have Raymond Carver's outstanding The River and several of Jim Harrison's poems among other works. Then, there's Gary Snyder's incomparable Mountains and Rivers Without End, which includes several river-specific poems and, last but not least for now, there's the more expansive themes in River of Words: Youth Art and Poetry Inspired by the Natural World. We're not sure if any of you think you may need or want something like we're proposing to pull together, but the more we wrote today, the more we became sure we do.

The River

By Jim Harrison

Yes, we'll gather by the river,

the beautiful, the beautiful river.

They say it runs by the throne of God.

This is where God invented fish.

Wherever, but then God's throne is as wide

as the universe. If you're attentive you'll

see the throne's borders in the stars. We're on this side

and when you get to the other side we don't know

what will happen if anything. If nothing happens

we won't know it, I said once. Is that cynical?

No, nothing is nothing, not upsetting just

nothing. Then again maybe we'll be cast

at the speed of light through the universe

to God's throne. His hair is bounteous.

All the 5,000 birds on earth were created there.

The firstborn cranes, herons, hawks, at the back

so as not to frighten the little ones.

Even now they remember this divine habitat.

Shall we gather at the river, this beautiful river?

We'll sing with the warblers perched on his eyelashes.

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