For the last two nights I have gone to sleep with the sound of the river outside of my camper. I hear the river when I wake in the night and it is still there when I rise in the morning. The sound is familiar and comforting. It is, for me, the sound of home. My camper is parked in the yard of the place where we spent our childhood summers - a property that, for a while, is in the family and partially my responsibility. I come to the place each spring to turn on the water and each autumn to turn off the pump and drain the pipes so things don’t freeze up during the cold Montana winters. I have a lot of memories that are associated with this place, and more than a small amount of nostalgia when I think of it. But I have never been attached to a single place. My vocation has called me to serve in many places and taught me that my true home is not defined by titles and deeds and plats and maps. My true home is not a matter of real estate.

But my life has been shaped by the places where I have lived. More than that, it seems to me as I listen to the river’s roar, as surely as the waters have formed the shapes of the land, my life has been shaped by rivers.

The Boulder River gets its name from the rocks that form its bed. But it could easily have also been named for the sound of those rocks as they crash against each other. The streambed is not a static entity, but rather is constantly in motion as the rocks roll and tumble down from the mountains. As they move beneath the surface of the water, their rough edges are rounded and, by the time they reach this place, nearly 50 miles from the edge of the snowmelt in the mountains, the rocks are all smooth and sculpted into ovoids and spheres. The water starts in the mountains as crystal clear snow melt. But dip a glassful from the river as it goes by this place and the sediment will quickly fall to the bottom of the glass. It is only muddy during the peak of high water. But year round, there is constant sediment that is not brown, but rather a gray-green. It is rock dust – tiny particles that break off of the rocks as they roll and tumble beneath the surface. When the rocks become small enough the gravel collects in eddies and riffles and shallow spots. These are the places where the brown and rainbow trout come to lay their eggs. The fish return to the area where they were spawned, but the gravel is constantly changing. And the river is re-shaping itself.

The big changes of the river come in the spring with high water. Depending on the weather, the snow can melt quickly and spring rains can swell the river to four or five times the volume of water that flows at the end of the summer. When this happens, the river cuts away the banks on the outside of the curves. Large chunks of soil are swept away. The roots of the cottonwood trees are exposed. And, from time to time, the giant trees fall into the river. In the boulder the upstream ends of islands are collecting points for the fallen trees. Their branches and roots crack and crunch under the pressure of the water. Sometimes even the giant trunks snap under the power of the river. When they are washed to the Yellowstone, the become sleepers in the bigger river, floating beneath the surface. Other than a few irrigation diversions, the water from our river doesn’t meet a dam until it has flowed into the Missouri and entered North Dakota. A tree felled by spring flooding can end up as driftwood anywhere between the inside of a bend here and the slow waters behind Garrison Dam 400 miles downstream.

But this isn’t the only river that has shaped my life. Like the rocks and trees, I started by flowing downstream. My college years were spend not far from the Yellowstone River. It is a bigger river, though not too large to swim across if you know what you are doing and understand rivers. It has claimed the lives of those who thought they could defeat its flow. But if you allow yourself to be swept downstream, you can cross it. The Yellowstone is a great wild and free river that flows from Yellowstone Lake in Yellowstone National Park and gathers most of the tributaries from the east of the divide in the park. It flows through emigrant and paradise valley, appropriately named, and makes the big bend at the gates of the mountains at the town of Livingston. If you stand on the shore of the river at that bend, you will always feel the wind. In fact, it is impossible which is a more persistent and powerful force, the wind or the water. In that part of the world they are a pair of forces that cannot be denied and that punish those who think they can be defeated. 30 miles downstream from the gates, the Boulder empties into the Yellowstone. By Billings, where I went to college, it has also gained the Stillwater and Rock Creek and a lot of smaller tributaries.

By the standards of the state where I was born, Billings is the major urban center. But it isn’t much of a city when compared to Chicago where we next moved. Chicago rests along the shores of Lake Michigan where its residents cannot deny the hugeness of the natural world. The lake they use but do not alter. Turn your back on the lake, however, and people convince themselves that they are in charge. A system of locks and dikes allows the flow of the Chicago River to be temporarily reversed. On St’ Patrick’s Day they dye the river green. Most of the rest of the time it is so tame and calm that it could hardly be called a river by the standards of those alongside of which I grew into adulthood. There aren’t many rocks ground to dust under the Chicago River. A glass dipped into it would yield more algae and green growing junk than rock dust.

Since those days I have lived in dry places, where we sometimes have to call little creeks rivers because that is all we have. But the waters continue to shape my life. No one who was in Rapid City in 1972 will ever doubt the power of water.

But that is another story for another day.

Today I am grateful to wake to the sound of the river. More than 40 years since I moved from this place, the water still sings to me and stirs my soul.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.