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Outdoors North: A river’s healing embrace

JOHN PEPIN

“The empty rooms where her memory is protected, where the angels’ voices whisper to the souls of previous times,” – Bob Dylan

It was a summer day like today, many, many years ago, when the first sounds from that grand masterpiece came rolling across my brain. Those intricate lyric lines, produced with great skill and precision, and the familiar old melodies produced in kind, remain with me today.

With the heat sweltering outside, I sit in the cool indoors dropping the needle on this old classic – I got a new pony.

The sound of this music resonates just as clearly within me today as it did way back on those first few spins. Something so new, so exciting, so brilliant.

If I close my eyes, my ability to grab ahold of the notes and the structure are enhanced. Like watching a motion picture in widescreen format, my mind expands to a broad panorama.

Senor, can you tell me where we’re headin,’ Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?

I can hear not only the sounds, but the spaces in between, which were artfully created. My mind disconnects from its earthly constraints and runs fast and far.

I am back in the golden yellow summertime of those days.

The river ran slow and glided back and forth all around me as I waded the stream, fishing for trout. I had caught a nice, big brown trout here before, but this summer it was brook trout and an occasional rainbow.

The river was my friend in the truest sense – reliable, listening, speaking softly, always there for me. In those humid and hot summer days, that was important to me.

I was nursing a particularly acute broken heart in a young love affair gone sideways. I sought solace at the river. I returned to the river to fish almost every night.

I think this was one of the very first times I came to learn the healing power of nature to embrace, renew and strengthen. Today, I rely constantly on this immense power to help sustain me.

I remember that on those hot early evenings, I could draw cool water up to my face in my hands. The water was not only refreshing and smelled sweet, it was easier to breath taking in that air that swirled over the top, like in a sauna.

On one of those nights I stood as still as I could as a deer emerged out of the brush and walked gingerly down to the river to get a drink. Standing in the water in waders, the deer didn’t sense my presence at first.

When she did see me, she just backed up the slope to the water and then stood and looked at me for a few seconds. Then she walked back into the thorn-apple bushes.

There would be a good deal of other important music that summer into the autumn.

This music was another true friend, soothing my pain with lyrics that empathized with my condition or distracted me from the troubles I was suffering.

Sometimes I wonder, what’s going on with Ms. X, she’s got such a sweet disposition, I never know what the poor girl is going to do to me next.

It was one of those chicken and egg things. Was the summer memorable because of the music or was the music memorable because of that summer? Either way, those albums and those songs remain among those closest to my heart and bones.

Recently, I returned to the river. I had last done so during the wintertime. A lot of change had rolled through the area – a lot of water under the bridge.

In some ways, it looked much the same – still reliable and gently, moving slow.

But the riverbanks had changed. The trees and bushes had grown up so much. It looked a good deal different.

The rocks on the bottom of the river were still black and were adorned by scraggly bits of river weeds that clung to the sides of the stones. The river still turned on its bend, where three or four huge boulders served as make-shift islands in the stream.

There were still gray catbirds skulking in the thick brush making their chortling sounds and cat mewing, while robins sang into the skies that still seemed to cover much of the scene. The blackberry bramble was still there.

The river I came to know so well was flowing south, taking my worries away. Today, the stream didn’t appear to know me. Maybe I was just one of many souls wandering to the river’s banks, looking for a better way forward, making my face no longer familiar.

The river did its job. It took my troubles and washed them downstream – down through the rapids, the falls, a few power dams and out to the big lake.

The thorn-apples are still here along the riverbanks too. This is still a very beautiful place where evergreen trees stand along another big corner, this one downstream from the bridge.

I think this is one place I could see myself ending up. My folks used to take me here when I was too young to fish or do much else.

Those old songs still live on here though. I think they are part of the landscape, with the notes, chords and lyric lines woven into the trees and plants and the molecules of the river and sky themselves.

Just being there, I could hear the songs in my head all over again. Reminiscing about those days seems romanticized to me now. In fact, they were quite tragically sad for me, but you’d never know that with the reverence I hold for the river and the music.

I guess that’s because it was those things that helped deliver me. The circumstances themselves could have varied greatly. The river seemed to know that whatever the matter was, it could help – that power was incredible to feel.

I still find the incredible power of nature available to me these, but more so now in other places. The trick is getting out there among the things that seem to matter more, like dragonflies flying and fish swimming and deer drinking water.

In short, life continuing. Life going on regardless.

In Idaho, there is a wild and rugged area called the Frank Church Wilderness where the River of No Return is found. Some people say the river is called that because it is said to change visitors. They don’t come back the same person after experiencing it.

My river was like that. It was able to change me by just visiting. It was always some place I’d been, ever since I can remember.

But it was that one summer – when I really needed a true friend – that the river showed me its power. Thinking back on it now, it’s hard to see how things might have worked out if I hadn’t spent those summer evenings out there.

Those songs on those old records are like that river too.

I am happy I learned so many years ago about the power of music and nature to pick up a person and fit them back into where, what, how and why they are supposed to be.

I am so grateful.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.

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