This morning, almost first thing, I am stirred by the words — one word especially — of poet, Sarah McCartt-Jackson. Since then I find myself drifting, doodling downriver. Downrivering. Downriver drifting…
a creek that gets deeper
as it downrivers,…—Sarah McCartt-Jackson, “Borrow” (Source: Academy of American Poets)
Hammocking with Carley, trying to decipher a subtle symphony of birdsong, breakfast tea flowing, slow swirling from mug to palate to belly to brain, tannic trip from mouth to headwaters.
Riffling through poems, pages, chapters, essaying to identify the resonance, the familiarity, so many birds braiding their songs into a morning, Merlin-ing mysteries into species, images, and descriptions.
Waterway downriver deepening. Downriver. One word; one way. 
downriver /ˈdaʊnˈrɪvɚ/ adverb : in the direction in which a river flows : downstream (Source: Britannica Dictionary)
Such restraint and efficiency powering this poem. Slim and agile. A downriver drift stealthy and mesmerizing as creeks are. Brooks are. Rivers are. Gravitational inevitability. Starting with these first lines.
We borrow from the land what we can but cannot
return to it—Sarah McCartt-Jackson, “Borrow” (Source: Academy of American Poets)
Borrow, indeed. Denial silted into linguistic euphemism.
Drifting. Downrivering. Remembering words of a favorite teacher thirty five years ago. A chance encounter between classes. How are you doing? A greeting cloaked in a question. She smiles off the greeting and answers the question.
“Like sticks and leaves tangled in a stream,” she starts, laughing, gaze distant. “Stuck behind a rock, tugged by turbulence, but unable to untangle, to rejoin the flow…”
I’m paraphrasing. A third of a century later, the exact words are wanting, but the gist endures. It’s become a point of reference on my life map.
Years later, I visited her and her husband. They were in the early pages of a new chapter. We ate a picnic lunch outside in the sunshine. Summer breeze. I reminded her of the encounter. She laughed again. She often laughs. She didn’t remember the encounter, the fragment of a conversation, but she agreed that it sounded like something she would’ve thought and said. Something she would’ve shared.
Downrivering again. Unstuck from a rock. Or maybe an overhanging branch. Pulled by the current, with the current toward the river’s mouth, drifting above a deepening waterway toward the delta, the outpouring. Emergence and convergence.
During my boyhood years growing up at Homeport in Wadhams, the Boquet River figured prominently in my adventures, my memories… Swimming. Almost drowning. My mother saving not just me, but all three of us. Fishing. Mapping and remapping sandbars that shifted seasonally. Canoeing with my father and my siblings in whitewater rapids that we eventually had to abandon. Skating in winter. The tiny boathouse sinking into the sandy ground riverside, sometimes inundated with rushing water during spring floods.
Downrivering again past rapids and falls, past old villages and new dwellers, past gentle eddies and sleepy sections — like Butternut Flats, perhaps? — and past bridges and former mills that still echo with ambition long after wheels have stilled and industry has rolled on.
Now, as Susan and I draft still-germinal ideas and hopes into plans that may someday emerge as a successor to Rosslyn, further north on the Adirondack Coast. I consider the proximity of the land (where we may someday start homing anew) to the mouth of the Boquet River. The waterfront is within eyesight of the shallow delta reaching far out into Lake Champlain. The river of my youth emptying into the lake of my present and future.
Even a river “that gets deeper as it downrivers” eventually shallows and spreads wide when it reaches its destination, outflowing, mixing fluvial borrowings into lake waters.
And so my downriver drifting arrives at its end if not its conclusion. Carley and I untether ourselves from the morning sun, from braided birdsong and hugging hammock, and we head inside to wake Susan and make breakfast.
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