Floating on the words
Navigate the shifting identities of the people living alongside the shores of Depot Creek
For many of us, especially those consigned to the urban grind, the idea of a retreat in the country, with a creek or river running just outside, is just a dream.
Kingston, Ont., writer Helen Humphreys has been living that dream for more than a decade, with a small property on the shores of Depot Creek in Eastern Ontario, one of the headwaters of the Napanee River. With her new book, The River, Humphreys dives into an epoch-spanning look at that stretch of Depot Creek.
Coming mere months after the publication of The Evening Chorus, her stirring and powerful novel, The River is something of a surprise.
Accompanied by photographs, historical documents, illustrations and archives, the book examines the river’s history geographically and ethnographically, tracing both its physical movements and the lives of those who settled around it.
Humphreys chronicles the shifting identities of the river from the Algonquin, “the people who lived beside the river for thousands of years, and whose history was intertwined with that landscape,” to the settlers who used the river to move their timber to Lake Ontario, or to fuel their mills, and to its chiefly recreational use today.
Humphreys focuses mainly, however, on the natural worlds of the river, the flora and fauna near and within its waters, and to the relationship between na- ture and the human interlopers (one of the first images we have of the river is of its bottom, with “lengths of sodden wood, silty hollows choked with old bottles, tires, the bones of animals . . .”).
Threaded through the book are short pieces of fiction, between anecdote and story, in which we see not only how the river can figure in fiction, but how a gifted writer can make use of the raw material of the world around her.
Readers expecting intense, tightly focused nature writing, akin to that of Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, will probably be disappointed, but that’s on them: The River delivers what it promises, in fine style.
It’s a highly personal book, driven by Humphreys’ curiosities and predilections.
It is less, ultimately, an exploration of the river than it is an exploration of Humphreys’ experience of the river, which is as it should be.
To read it is to float downstream on Humphrey’s words, bobbing easily along the surface, yet fully immersed in the world, catching glimpses of wonder around and below. Robert Wiersema’s latest book is Black Feathers.