Hello, Radio Readers – I’m Jane Holwerda from Dodge City, Kansas. It’s great to be back with our Fall 2021 Book Read: “Rivers and Meandering Meanings.”
In his genre-defying book Elevations, Max McCoy, who directs the Center for Great Plains Studies at Emporia State, recounts his journey – by kayak, on foot, and by Jeep—following the Arkansas River from its headwaters in Leadville, Colorado, through southwestern and on to southeastern Kansas.
In Dodge City, the Ark River runs dry. The riverbed is used for walking and running, riding of horses and all-terrain vehicles. McCoy connects the region’s wild west history and the unique gun laws of Kansas with a Dodge City riverbed shooting in 2010, connections which support his idea that our interactions with rivers –both real and symbolic—represent a border space where our good behavior and our less good behavior meet. He writes that “the word river comes from the edge where most of our interactions with rivers stops and the wildness begins. Rivers represent the banks of our experience, and the desire to go beyond them.”
As for me? That we Dodge Citians make use of the dry riverbed of the Arkansas is a good thing. Yet when I drive through Kinsley and Hutchinson I thrill to see water, however meager, in the Arkansas River. Because? Well, because a running river is a much better thing... and it’s a much richer source of positive symbolism…I’m biased, a bit, for having grown up in a small town the Smoky River wends through. The Smoky is narrow and deep in some places. As it curves along the edge of town, its low banked sand bars became places we teenagers congregated and dared each other to jump and climb over bits and pieces of an old broken dam. Around the bend, as trains rattled and rumbled over a trestle bridge, we lay underneath, foolishly proud of our daring. An old metal staircase was a place to sit and stare at the eddies and currents and flotsam, and dream and scheme, free from parental oversight, a place where we might practice some skills in adulting… Many of us were taught to canoe. To be on the river commanding and piloting your way – even as you might scrape bottom or run aground or get caught up in a current that spins you off course—is good preparation for life-- for knowing when to stay on course, how to deal with getting swept off course, and for finding humor in just getting stuck.
Later, I developed a taste for rafting –not the white water rafting or kayaking that requires skill and preparation as McCoy describes—but the kind that allows you to drift and float on a hot summer day with a dozen of your best friends and with coolers of sandwiches and iced beverages down a slow lazy river for hours, to be free, for a little while, of adult responsibilities, free to drift and float as the river wants. Until it’s time to dock, moor, and go on land again.
Meandering. Maybe it’s something we all need just a wee bit more of.
For HPPR Radio Readers, I’m Jane Holwerda, from Dodge City, Kansas. Read on, my friends. Read on!
