by Rachel Crummy
“—and for those few seconds, beckoned on and shivered by that hourglass-shaped and silvered force that is a mouth and has a tongue and utters, after miles and minutes and years on the flow and in it, I am rivered.”
-Robert MacFarlane, Is a River Alive?
We are camped next to a diagonally striped cliff, in contrasting colours: ochre, charcoal, and flint grey. Swallows slice the air. Apparently, they live in little holes in the cliff.
Hart River, Photo by Rachel Crummy
Our home for the night is a gravel bar, an inadequate name for this vast island of stones in all possible colours, shapes, and sizes. Each one is different from all the others. We are camped on a galaxy of stones, shaped by water, wind, and time, each stone exactly itself, not imitating any other. They speak a language of infinity that is not random chaos and not uniformity, they speak subtlety, pattern, and numberless shades of difference that ask to be held in the palm and touched, perhaps slipped into a pocket.
Underneath the murmuring voice of the river flowing by, there is a swelling silence. It emanates from these countless stones. And, there is another phenomenon at play.
The sound of the river has been with us ever since we left Elliot Lake eight days ago now. It is with us while we sleep, forgetful, full of dream images, the mind stream pulled by the river, ceaselessly sounding in the sub-conscious chambers of our beings.
“The ringing silence…”
The ringing silence is like an after image produced when you stare at the sun. You close your eyes and see a dark hole burned behind your lids. This void is the perfect inverse of the bright light that created it. In the same way, the constant rushing voice of the river creates a ringing silent field at a frequency beyond one’s ordinary range.
This braided water voice threads through every moment on the river, whether we notice it or not, pulling in her wake a silent vibratory field. It is like the sound stars produce on a cold, windless winter night.
Hart River, Photo by Rachel Crummy
In this way, our body-minds are imprinted by the voice of the river.
However, the river does more than this. She makes us echo. She stirs our mind-streams, picking up sand, rocks, and debris lying on the river bottom and carries it all to the surface. She conjures vivid dreams at night—all kinds of people and scenarios, long forgotten, but stored somewhere out of sight, and animated by the mesmeric power of the river’s pull.
“There is the repetition of days…”
There is the repetition of days—sleep, wake, cook over a fire, pack up camp, pull on wetsuit, climb into boat, get pulled along the water around curves, past rocky shoals, past quiet forests of black spruce, moss, and wildflowers, past rugged cliffs and old mountains, dipping one’s paddle in the water over and over again, sore shoulders, clammy butt, tired knees.
The water has a force and a will that the boat cannot resist, though we can choose our angle of approach. Hours later, we pull over to shore, and set up camp; then we will do it all over again the next day. In this rhythm I have forgotten what day of the week it is. I have no appointment calendar to consult. At the peak of summer in this northern latitude it never gets dark. The hours—one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock—are irrelevant. The activities of our days are simple and tied to subsistence. Yet despite this repetition, each day is utterly singular.
Each day has a unique outline defined by shifts in the weather and landscape, which intertwine in increasingly apparent ways with mood. Each moment is specific, defined by the speed of the current, the cloud cover or its absence, the bend in the river and the new vista it reveals, a mountain valley opens up, a dramatic cliff approaches, what seemed to be a cave becomes a keyhole; a triangular piece of sky suddenly appears in the ancient, studded spire of rock perched askew on the cliff face.
An eagle swoops down to grab a fish. A caribou lifts her curious gaze; her antlers curve upwards to softly rounded tips; startled, she canters off into the bush. Mist shrouds the jagged ridgeline of an ancient mountain.
Hart River, Photo by Rachel Crummy
Wildflowers bloom from moss, meadow, and stony slopes. There is Sparrow’s Egg Lady Slipper (Cypripedium passerinum), Mountain Deathcamas (Zigadenus elegans), Dwarf Fireweed (Epilobium latifolium), and Shrubby Cinquefoil (Potentilla fructicosa). As we walk, we crush plants underfoot and smell Black Spruce and Labrador Tea. Cloudberries are ripening.
chronos vs kairos
These are all singular happenings of time-and-place that have nothing to do with clocks and calendars—in other words, linear time, what the ancient Greeks called chronos.
These happenings have everything to do with kairos, which the Greeks knew to be a different kind of time altogether, one that has to do with the right or critical moment, or in other words, timeliness. Kairos is the opportune instant when forces meet.
In response, my nervous system hums. A knot, which was tightly wound by deadlines and insecurity (aka the humdrum routine suffering of the industrialized human navigating urban 21st century life) loosens. This softening is surrounded by a murmuring radiant field, that I can only describe as life unfolding in rhythmic chords of kairos.
That is, life at this northern latitude, by the banks of the clear, flowing Hart River, unfolds in an intricate and timely relationship with everything else. The black bear runs, the caribou senses, the fish jump, the mosquitos buzz, sun shines, rain falls, dry moss absorbs water and becomes plump, juicy, and deeply hued, flowers open and beckon pollinators.
All of these happenings rely on timeliness—on the opportune instant. My mosquito hunting has become finely honed; I can squish one with the clap of my two hands. Sometimes I am late and it is already full of my blood, splat, I’ve produced a dead mosquito carcass and a fresh blood stain. The falcon carrying the wriggling creature in its claws, the amount of tilt and paddling power required to puncture the eddy and pull one’s boat out of the main current and into the opposing flow—these are both instances of timeliness, of kairos, which is different from the chronos of clock time.1
Kairos is experiential—this kind of time requires us to be present in our bodies. By contrast chronos is measured by the clock, which divides time into abstract standardized chunks. The pebbles of the Hart River know nothing of such uniformity; their timeliness congeals the relational forces of water and stone in idiosyncratic ways. I apprehend their form in an instant but their larger story is inscrutable to me. It would take centuries to decipher.
Hart River, Photo by Rachel Crummy
“There is nothing abstract about the river….”
There is nothing abstract about the river. She is elemental—water and rock in constant ever-shifting relation. Does the rock want to be carved into a gorge, split and sifted into ever finer gradations of stone to pebble to sand? I don’t know what a rock wants. These words are human words, but they have been pulled out of me by the water and her attendant forces and creatures, the rocks she shapes and that shape her, the plants she nurtures, the animals that drink from her.
This is not to deny the river her wild radiant Otherness—which is beyond the reach of language. To read about the river is not to experience her. To be carried in her flow for two weeks in July is not to know her in all her seasons, though we see evidence of her wild spring flood in the broken tree limbs carried to impossibly high places. Perhaps in these words something of her liveliness remains. The river needs nothing from me, but I have been moved by her flow. I am rivered.
- For more on chronos vs kairos, see Jenny Odell’s book “Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture”
