My neighbor Judy Smith, who is a geologist, told me one afternoon that the shale cliffs we looked up at from her cottage porch, along the north branch of the Susquehanna River, are Devonian rocks, some 360 million years old. She explained that an ancient river flowed north, opposite the direction of our current river, and cut this chasm. It is difficult for the human mind, my mind at least, to comprehend such expanses of deep time, but for Judy it seemed rather nonchalant. I guess when you watch the sun set most evenings on the Devonian Epoch, it becomes easier to close the gap.
If I climb the ridge behind my house and stand on top of those same Devonian rocks, I can look down through the chestnut oaks and see the river flowing past, toward Judy’s place. This view reminds me of a passage from Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire: “It is possible from here to gaze down on the backs of soaring birds.” When a pair of red-tailed hawks cruise on the thermals and the pileated woodpeckers cackle, I realize that possibility.
The artist Graydon Mayer lived in our farmhouse during the 1970s. He painted many local landscapes around the river here, and he taught art from an addition he built onto the original two-story house. I have one of his paintings, of a stone wall lined by young oak and maple trees framing a distant pasture, with hills in the background. It is a winter scene, and long shadows reach across the snow. I like to think he painted it en plein air from the top of our property.
White pine and maple eventually colonized the pasture depicted in the painting, and the chestnut oaks naturally settled onto the rocky slopes. The smaller trees in Mayer’s painting matured, then seeded the understory. Black birches and red maples have filled the gaps since the woods were last logged, about 30 years ago. Some young hemlocks remain, and some old ones stand as dead snags, fragments of the ancients that once grew here, proof of the inevitable change that always comes to the land.
Sometimes my boys and I launch our canoe from the Falls beach about 3 miles upstream. We drift an olive wooly bugger I tied behind our 14-foot Old Town. Tommy lets his younger brother Rudy net the smallmouth bass as we float. The fish’s bronze flanks and dark striations reflect all the summers as far as I can remember, fishing with my Pop-Pop not far from this very stretch. In lieu of casting, I pay line out from my reel and wedge the fly rod between the stern and my seat. Tommy learns to paddle slowly and to keep the bow pointed downstream.
A kingfisher flies relays between box elders and silver maples. A great blue heron works a muddy bank below the mouth of Whitelock Creek. She flies ahead of us in low, sweeping curves down the river, dragging her muddy ankles behind her, barely brushing the water’s surface. Swifts draw lines over the tributary. They are acrobats with sickle wings, turning, dipping, and rising at sharp angles. The flock and the landscape multiply by two in the reflection on the river. Smartweed blooms, and the swifts stir the aroma on the river air.
We float at about two and a half miles an hour, give or take. I wonder if Judy’s ancient, north-flowing river moved at a similar speed. A commercial jet flies across the bluebird sky. In a few seconds it has gone about as far as the river flows in an entire afternoon. The boys and I stare up at the sky, necks craning, and wonder.
We float past the landing and meet Judy’s son and granddaughters on the gravel shoals across from their cottage. We all take turns with the fly rod, fishing a deep hole with a big boulder, catching fish on every cast it seems. Night creeps toward us on the back edge of that long afternoon light, and we climb the bank toward the cottage to build a fire and to watch the sun set. Behind us, the river flows on by under the shale cliffs.