Driftwood
A river tugs at whatever is within reach, trying to set it afloat and carry it downstream. Living trees are undermined and washed away. No piece of driftwood is safe, though stranded high up on the bank; the river will rise to it, and away it will go.
The river extends this power of drawing all things with it even to the imagination of those who live on its banks. Who can long watch the ceaseless lapsing of a river's current without conceiving a desire to set himself adrift, and, like the driftwood which glides past, float with the stream clear to the final ocean?
~Harlan Hubbard
from Shantyboat: A River Way of Life, published 1977 by University Press of Kentucky.
The river extends this power of drawing all things with it even to the imagination of those who live on its banks. Who can long watch the ceaseless lapsing of a river's current without conceiving a desire to set himself adrift, and, like the driftwood which glides past, float with the stream clear to the final ocean?
~Harlan Hubbard
from Shantyboat: A River Way of Life, published 1977 by University Press of Kentucky.
posted by Dan Trabue | Monday, December 03, 2012
1 Comments:
I purchased a copy of Shanty Boat and Payne Hollow both when I was seventeen, in a bookstore on the Monument Circle downtown Indianapolis, In. I believe everyone should read those two books as part of school. I lived in a home on the river in Carmel In. My Mom and her second husband took a boat trip from Carmel, just north of Carmel downriver to the junction of Wabash and the Mississippi. It was a two week trip.
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