One Long River of Song
Last week, Katie and I felt the need for a change of scenery, so we found an Airbnb down in Tucson, a little place in the foothills of the Catalinas. The house had comfortable reading chairs and good natural light. We were led to believe we'd hear coyotes at night and see quail from the patio in the mornings, but alas, it wasn't to be. Stunning sunsets and steady mountain breezes were nice consolation prizes. And with Tucson being the first UNESCO City of Gastronomy in the United States, you better believe we enjoyed some delicious Mexican food, including Sonoran hot dogs "con todo."
While in Tucson, I read a book that, it's safe to say, has lodged itself somewhere deep inside of me. Like, it's playing for keeps. One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder is a posthumous collection of essays and poems by Brian Doyle, who died in 2017. Chapters are short, sentences are long, and he sometimes omits commas at will. Mostly, though, Doyle's writing bubbles over with joy and warmth and, yes, wonder. Even when he's writing about the NICU, the 9/11 jumpers, and cancer.
He has a chapter on Acipenser transmontanus, the white sturgeon, an apparently harmless but (to me) utterly terrifying bony-armored fish that can grow to be fifteen feet long, weigh fifteen hundred pounds, and live well over a hundred years. Maybe. No one's exactly sure. Nor does anyone quite understand why or how some sixty thousand of these massive creatures might "gather in immense roiling balls in the river" – in one case collectively ramming themselves against the bottom of a dam in the Columbia River, making engineers, we can assume, just a little bit nervous. It's like Sharknado. But somehow even weirder. And real.
In case you're wondering, yes, Boyle does have a point in telling us all this: "Most of what we do know is that we don't know hardly anything, which cheers me up wonderfully. The world is still stuffed with astonishments beyond our wildest imagining, which is humbling, and lovely, and maybe the only way we are going to survive ourselves and let everything else survive us too."
