Little Rivers

  "For real company and friendship, there is nothing outside of the animal kingdom that is comparable to a river," author/angler Henry van Dyke wrote in an 1895 essay. Henry was a preacher, but we should forgive him that, since he also had a great passion for pursuing trout.
  "I will admit that a very good case can be made out in favour of some others of natural affection," he went on in a book called Little Rivers. "For example, a fair apology has been offered by those ambitious persons who have fallen in love with the sea. But, after all, that is a formless and disquieting passion. It lacks solid comfort and mutual confidence. The sea is too big for loving, and too uncertain...you might as well think of loving a glittering generality like 'the American woman.' One would be more to the purpose...
  "It is by a river that I would choose to make love, and to revive old friendships, and to play with the children, and to confess my faults, and to escape from vain, selfish desires, and to cleanse my mind from all the false and foolish things that mar the joy and peace of living...
  "The personality of a river is not to be found in its water, nor in its bed, nor in its shore. Either of these elements, by itself, would be nothing. Confine the fluid contents of the noblest stream in a walled channel of stone and it ceases to be a stream; it becomes what Charles Lamb calls 'a mockery of a river--a liquid artifice--a wretched conduit.' But take away the water from the most beautiful riverbanks, and what is left? An ugly road with none to travel it; a long, ghastly scar on the bosom of the earth...
  "Every country--or at least every country that is fit for habitation--has its own rivers, and every river has its own quality, and it is the part of wisdom to know and love as many as you can, seeing each in the fairest possible light, and receiving from each the best that it has to give...
  "Every river that flows is good and has something worthy to be loved. But those that we love most are always the ones that we have known best--the stream that ran before our father's door, the current on which we ventured our first boat or cast our first fly, the brook on whose banks we picked the twinflower of young love...
  "I will set my affections upon rivers that are not too great for intimacy. And if by chance any of these little ones have also become famous, like the Tweed and the Thames and the Arno, I at least will praise them, because they are still at heart little rivers...
  "Little rivers seem to have the indefinable quality that belongs to certain people in the world--the power of drawing attention without courting it, the faculty of exciting interest by their very presence and way of doing things. The most fascinating part of a city or town is that through which the water flows. Idlers always choose a bridge for their place of meditation when they can get it; and, failing that, you will find them sitting on the edge of a quay or embankment, with their feet hanging over the water...  "The real way to know a little river is not to glance at it here and there in the course of a hasty journey, nor to become acquainted with it after it has been partly civilized and spoiled by too close contact with the works of man. You must go to its native haunts; you must see it in youth and freedom; you must accommodate yourself to its influence, and follow its meanderings wherever they may lead you...
  "There is such a thing as taking ourselves and the world too seriously, or at any rate too anxiously. Half of the secular unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain idea that every man is bound to be a critic of life, and to let no day pass without finding some fault with the general order of things, or projecting some plan for its improvement.
  "The other half comes from the greedy notion that man's life does consist, after all, in the abundance of the things that he possesses, and that it is somehow or other more respectable and pious to be always at work making a larger living than it is to lie on your back in the green pastures and beside the still waters and thank God that you are alive.
  "And so I wish that your winter fire may burn clear and bright while you read this, and that the summer days may be fair and the fish may rise merrily to your fly, whenever you follow one of these little rivers."

Second last Photo Credit: Kevin Longard  - SKAGIT RIVER FLIES  
  Last Photo Credit: Steve Olson