Closing the Gates

When I was seven years old, my family moved from Hopkinsville to Paducah. We were much happier in Paducah, which seemed somehow smarter and more genteel than the more raffish Hoptown. Whenever my dad wasn't too busy, my parents, my brother and I would get into our new 1973 Pontiac and set off to explore our new hometown.

Sooner or later, we would usually end up downtown, staring at the stores that still dominated Paducah commerce as they had done for decades. And then my dad would drive through the huge floodgates that protected downtown Paducah from the enormous Ohio River. Usually at this point, we would stop the car, get out, and look at the river. That was where I really gained an appreciation for the vastness of nature. The river was so large, so busy, so indifferent to us. You had to be careful around it ("Don't y'all get too close to that river.") You had to respect it. And always, standing behind you like a silent warning, was the flood wall -- a constant reminder that the river had tried to destroy Paducah before, and might try to do so again.

I saw the river in many circumstances and many moods -- bright and clear during the Summer Festival, brown and forbidding in November, high and rising in the spring. Even when I wasn't physically next to the river, I was always aware of it. Paducah called itself the River City, and almost everyone knew someone who worked on the river, or fished on the river, or had stories to tell about the river. It's the reason the town was built where it is, and it was still a major economic engine when I grew up there.

Of course, people were constantly trying to come up with more ways to make money off of the river. There were always schemes floating around to develop the river, to bring tourists, to make the riverfront more attractive. Few if any of these schemes came to fruition -- at least when I lived there. I think people who live in river towns always overestimate how fascinating rivers are to outsiders. There is a mystery to a great river -- an exciting and mesmerizing mystery to those who know how to hear it. It's the mystery that runs through Mark Twain's great Mississippi stories, that drove so much blues music, and that haunted T.S. Eliot long after he left St. Louis for England. But outsiders can't hear the mystery. They don't get rivers, and they don't understand why river people care about them so much. So schemes based on the idea that outsiders want to look at the river -- or float on the river, or just be near the river -- never quite work out. Everyone appreciates the ocean. Only river people truly appreciate rivers.

Anyway, I am reflecting on these points because once again, the river that gave life to Paducah is trying to flood it. The gates that we used to drive through have been closed, and everyone is hoping that they will hold. In the meantime, the storms that have created the flooding have also thrown off the usual collection of tornadoes and other heavy windstorms to disrupt life throughout the Channel 6 viewing area. All of this makes me very sad. I am amazed at just how difficult it is to survive in western Kentucky, and I am deeply impressed that my parents have lived there for so long. I pray for them, and for everyone back home, that they will be spared, and that the river (and the winds) will return to their normal indifference.

In the meantime, here's a little section of a poem by T.S. Eliot (it's called "The Dry Salvages"), in which this son of St. Louis reflects on rivers. He puts all of this much better than I do, but then again he was a genius:

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god -- sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier,
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities -- ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonored, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.