Page 27 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

The Rules of Rivers6

Kathleen Dean Moore

At midnight on the Toklat River in the Alaska Range, the thermometer recorded 93 degrees. The sun,

dragging anchor in the northwest sky, fired rounds of heat against the cabin. I was lying naked on the

bunk, slapping mosquitos. Next to the wall, my husband lay completely covered by a white sheet, as

still and dismayed as a corpse. He would rather be hot than bitten, and I would rather be bitten than

hot.

I had come to the Toklat River to think about global warming, and it wasn’t going well. The week’s heat

was breaking all-­‐time records, drawing a new spike on the graph of jaggedly rising temperatures in

Alaska. The average day is now four degrees warmer than just a few decades ago, and seven degrees

warmer in winter. The Arctic is heating twice as fast as the rest of the world.

Furious and despairing, I had no chance of falling asleep that night. So I pulled on clothes and walked to

the bank of the river. On a spruce bench gnawed by bears, I sat and watched the river churn.

The Toklat is a shallow river that braids across a good half mile of gravel beds, dried stream courses

and deep-­‐dug channels. Sloshing with meltwater, it clatters along through islands and willow thickets.

Banging rocks on cobblestones, surging into confused swells, the grey currents looked unpredictable

and chaotic. But there were patterns.

A hydrologist once explained the rules of rivers as we walked a river-­‐path. The processes of a river are

manifestations of energy, he said. A fast, high-­‐energy river will carry particles – the faster the river, the

bigger the particle. But when it loses energy and slows, the river drops what it carries. So anything

that slows a river can make a new landscape. It could be a stick lodged against a stone or the ribcage of

a calf moose drowned at high water. Where the water piles against the obstacle, it drops its load, and

6 Excerpt from keynote address, Geography of Hope conference, March 2015. It first appeared in Orion as a “Lay of the

Land” feature, October 2014

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