The River Abides
The Ohio River is big. From the deck of a boat, one can appreciate the scale of the bridges required to convey vehicles from Kentucky to Indiana, across the Ohio river. It is not hard to imagine the immense challenge of constructing the first bridge across this muscular flowing expanse of water. Then came the time when the Ohio was crowded by steam powered river boats, conveying the products of commerce for a young, growing nation. On our short cruise up the river we passed a abandoned dwelling, placed too close to the rivers edge. It was wrecked. The river does not always stay within it’s banks.
I
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 recognised 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. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.II
People change, and smile: but the agony abides.
Time the destroyer is time the preserver,
Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,
The bitter apple, and the bite in the apple.
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.excerpt – T. S. Eliot, Dry Salvages
