In celebration of rivers, rowers, and the work we won't neglect

In the writing of the slender book that became Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River, I moved in several directions before I settled on a form.  For a long time the book was a collection of stories about people, most of them imagined, who lived by or near the river at different junctures in time.  Today, I was remembering a piece I'd written about a character I'd originally named Lennie—a young woman who goes to the river in the 1870s to row.  This is a fragment torn from the original draft.  I publish it today in celebration of all my friends who do row or have rowed that river, including Katherine Wilson and Pam Sedor. I publish it, too, in celebration of all of us who work and rework our books, who keep thinking them through, until they are the best that we can make them and the world makes room for them.

She wore her scull upside down on her head like a hat, her hands on the riggers.  She rolled it over and laid it down, pulled the oars through the chokes, fastened the gates, and settled her heart.  She planted her feet in the stretchers and oared her way out, her back facing forward, her mind on her father’s words:  Shoulders to the sky, Lennie.  Knees at an angle.  Catch and drive and always finish.  Feather the blades so you’ll fly.  She left her hair loose, a dark burst about her face.  She let the breeze into her blouse.  She listened to the river, and to what the river had to say.  She went and she went, always beginning. 

Toward the wirework of the Girard Avenue Bridge. Toward the ghost of John Penn and the animals that had come to town in ’74 to live in their fanciful abodes:  the Fox Pens, the Wolf Pens, the Raccoon House, the village for the prairie dogs, the stoned-in pits for bears, the house of birds.  It was coming on to four o’clock, and she rowed: oars in, oars out, the commotion of animals up the hill.  A hawk, she noticed now, had flown in from the east, its red-tipped wings and tail mirrored in the river’s surface.  One of the reflected wings kept breaking apart and resurrecting itself with each of her oar strokes, as if it could attach to the scull its own flight.