Are Rivers Round?

As a river guide, people ask me lots of questions. What kind of bird is that? When is the best time for rafting? What’s my wife think of my occupation? Do I love Jesus? Where can I find peyote? This summer on the Rio Chama, as I was launching my raft from shore, one of my paddlers, a man from Dallas asked me my most favorite question of all,

“Do we get off where we got on?”

Everyone in the raft (the man’s in-laws) turned to him with looks of surprise, disappointment and shock. I just grinned and nodded my head, because I’d been asked this question before and I wasn’t offended by it.

“Do you mean literally? Or metaphorically?” I replied.

The man thought for a moment. “Literally.”

“Well, sometimes if there’s enough water,” I said. “But probably not today.”

I let my answer hang there like a matzo ball. The man looked confused. Then his sister-in-law laid into him, “Good Christ Jonathan, don’t you know that rivers begin in the mountains and then flow downhill to the ocean?”

“Are you ignorant or something?” His brother-in-law added.

Jonathan looked embarrassed and he gazed up at the hillsides to avoid eye contact with everyone. The whole group burst into laughter at poor Jonathan’s expense. It’s easy to make fun of Jonathan. But he’s not alone. Every river guide gets asked the circle question at least once a year.

Most of us live near a river, whether we know it or not. Texas, New York, it doesn’t matter. And yet most people are completely ignorant of rivers. In Memphis, the river is huge and hard to miss. In Atlanta, it may run underground, out of sight and out of mind. Most urban families probably don’t go to the river for recreation. Kids are usually warned to stay away from the river. Bad things happen down by the river. People get shot or overdose down by the river. Your uncle lives in a van down by the river. Also many inner-city kids never get to go rafting or to visit the mountains where rivers begin. They have no point of reference. But I’ve never had an inner-city teen ask the circle question. No, it’s usually an adult who went to college, and Jonathan definitely looked like he attended college.

In defense of Jonathan, most Native Americans, prior to the twentieth century, probably didn’t know where their rivers came from either. The Pueblo tribes along the Rio Grande may have viewed the river just as historian Paul Horgan describes it in his book Great River, “It came from the north beyond knowing, and it went to the south, nobody knew where.” Few of them had seen the headwaters in the San Juan Mountains or the river’s mouth in the Gulf of Mexico. A circular river may have made perfect sense.

These days, some people’s sense of adventure is shaped by modern amusement parks and controlled environments. In Texas there are water parks with inner tube rides that follow a canal around in a circle. I’ve heard stories of moms dropping their kids off on the Guadalupe River with innertubes. They sent them downstream and then sat there and waited for them to return just like they would at Six Flags. The kids ended up way down river in some farmer’s field. This kind of thing can be mocked or viewed as a valuable learning tool for the kids and the moms. Now they both know that the Guadalupe does not travel in a circle, at least not around San Antonio.

Lots of us have been on a round river trip at some point in our lives. When I was seventeen, I took a boat tour around the island of Manhattan. I’m pretty sure we boarded the boat on the East River and circumnavigated the entire island before returning to our point of departure. We got off at the same spot where we got on. It’s important to remember, though, that the boat was the thing traveling in a circle and not the river.

Didn’t we learn in elementary school that water follows a circular journey called the water cycle? Hydrologist Luna Leopold describes it in his book A View of the River as: “the grand cycle of movement of water from ocean to atmosphere to continent and back to ocean. It is the essential mechanism that allows organisms—including humans—to emerge, to develop, and to live on earth.” Luna Leopold is furthering a similar idea that his father, ecologist Aldo Leopold, introduced in his book The Sand County Almanac. In the chapter “The Round River,” Leopold refers to a Paul Bunyan tale, where a river runs topographically in a circle. It acts like a conveyor belt that provides an endless source of natural resources to courageous settlers.

Leopold sees the round river semi-metaphorically, as a “stream of energy which flows out of the soil into the plants, thence into animals, thence back into the soil in a never-ending circuit of life.” He calls it the “biotic continuum.” It sounds like a metaphor, but I don’t think Leopold meant it that way. He believed the biotic continuum is real, and that it cycles like water.

The more I think about a round river as a metaphor, the more I believe it could be literal. After all, most things in nature seem to follow a circular path. There’s the water cycle that Luna Leopold scientifically described and the biotic continuum that his father Aldo Leopold poetically theorized. There’s even a round river running inside each of our bodies. But I love metaphors. The earth and our lives have always been explained through metaphors. Maybe the circle question is the greatest metaphor ever because it symbolizes the biggest question in life. Does our existence follow a linear path or does it go around again? Literally?

Do we get off where we got on?