Willammete River"Saturday"
If rivers carry the current of human thought, then why not the Concord? Why wouldn't a "vigorous shove" launch Thoreau, as well as anyOdysseus, on an epic journey? Working, as I do, in a small college, I love this line anew when I re-encounter it. Here at Marylhurst, along the sleepy Willamette, I read Thoreau's words as a challenge. We are far from any centers of intellectual thought, but the river runs by our campus, no less than the Mississippi, the Ganges, the Nile, to quote Thoreau . . . or the Concord. We can walk, we can read, we can launch our boat on our own river. As Thoreau says in his discussion of the "fish principle," the "seeds of the lives of fishes are everywhere disseminated." For Marylhurst, too, lies under the sun.
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A small colleges is almost always on a small river, no? Can a college even be without at least a "crick"? For example Willamette University (note spelling) has an artificial creek running through it, which pools before the President's office, thus is called "Hudson's Bay" after the bigger, fiercer bay filled with disconsolately swimming polar bears. There is a lovely millcreek running through Middlebury College in Vermont. Whitman College has a meandering and lovely be-bridged creek running through it. Marylhurst has not only its Ganges, but also the lovely bottomly creek running through it, separating it from Mary's Wood. To quote one of my favorite sutras, "the highest good is like water." Its presence reminds us that the lowest places, that water seeks, are joined to the highest.
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