Rappahannock Moonlight

It is 4:00 a.m. Under a full moon and clear cold sky, the great eastward bend of the Rappahannock below the dam is liquid silver, flowing toward me out of the Blue Ridge ninety miles distant. This is the river of my boyhood, the first river I loved. This river taught me how a river lives in all its seasons. From the night Franklin and I crossed the Prettyman's Camp rapids in the storm, to summers of one long day--repeated beyond all counting--of swimming and paddling, treading water in the pools and seeing mica sparkle in the gravel ten feet down, to the solitary days of rock climbing the cliffs along the river. Seasons of fishing: Chick's new spinning rod, pork rind and smallmouth bass; Paddy Mullins' "carp bread" and thirty-pound carp in his bicycle basket. The drownings and rescue squad boats. Fish traps under the Falmouth Bridge. Herring and shad runs in May. Cleaning and salting fish. Gigging and chopping lamprey eels until the pools below the dam turned red with blood. Seasons of the wooden boat Daddy bought me and its last place in the ice and my foolish attempt to retrieve it in the winter river. Ice, snow, and hemlock trees. Endless pastures and wooded hills. Sparkling water so clear it has made me forever think that is how all rivers should look.

I remember all these things in this lie of moonlight. The river seldom runs so clear now. Under the bridges are great mounded bars of sand. The stream at Mott's Run is gone. The fields are full of houses, and along the river road, "Posted/No Trespassing" signs hang from every tree in sequence. At the bend of Prettyman's Camp where I once fell from the boat in the near rapid and tumbled, laughing in the white water, I stopped the car. I could not believe what was before me. The rapid in the near channel is gone. Gravel and mud break the surface. The rapid here is now a mud bar--residuum of fields along the Rapidan and upper Rappahannock. Development has brought erosion, and erosion brought the siltation of the river: burying the pools and channels under layers of mud and clay.

And the river I loved lies dying in this moonlight. Tonight there will be a total eclipse of the moon, but in the thick darkness of this smothering mud, tonight's eclipse will be only echo, counterpoint. The eclipse in the river has already begun. The penumbral shadow of ruin edges across the face of the river. That night in the summer storm thirty-five years ago, the wind tore out the clouds and the full moon gave light for passage. The mica in the bottom sparkled in a sunlight once, twice, removed. Like tiny stars strewn in the river bottom. And as I stand by the river this cold night, I wonder if my son or his, my daughter or hers, will ever see that sparkle here. Will the darkness be swept out of the bottoms and light break upward from the river bed again? Or will the Rappahannock die, shadowed in the dark of the moon? I stand alone by a river that has flowed in my heart for more than forty years and wonder if it is the cold that makes me shiver in this silver light.