Charles and Me

On those Sunday afternoons in the summer when they shut down Memorial Drive, the Charles River looks much more natural, to my eyes. His waters stand stiller and his blue is much purer without the tint of whizzing white and red and black cars only a five foot mild slope from weed-ridden shores. The joggers move slowly, at his pace, and the two sides of the slope flow together peacefully. In the winter, when the river freezes over and the parallel street is never closed and always full of roaring automobiles, the two sides could not clash more horribly. One is stuck still and silent against his will, and the other thunders past, hurling exhaust over the helpless icy surface. But for now, it is warm out, and I don’t think of those disagreeable winter days. A friend walks on the far right side of the street, and I walk on the edge of the elevated sidewalk next to her. My eyes are now able to rise above hers and see our almost full reflections in the dizzying water. Knowing that both I and the image formed by the water will always move in perfect unison is somehow comforting.
    At a young age, younger than I can remember for most other occasions, the Head of the Charles Regatta brought our family down to the join the droves of rowers and coaches and fans only a block and a half from our home. Past the makeshift booths selling everything from sweet potato fries to full racing shells, the river spanned before my eyes. The cool end-of-October winds blew smooth currents toward me. And so, ignoring the flying crews and steady launch boats, the currents and the festivities seemed more to be saying goodbye to one of the last Sundays when the road would be closed and the waters would be able to drift, than celebrating the regatta itself.
    In my seventh grade year, a minor catastrophe occurs in our relationship.
“But it isn’t natural.” insists the seventh grade earth science teacher. A great deal of the river, certain clean cut curves, the basin, is all manmade. Yes, its general path, the skeleton of the river, formed on its own, but what you see today is all a product of our community’s influence. My attention, but no one else’s, returns to the front of the room. This possibility has never crossed my mind. For a moment, the credibility gained by the river as a utopian idealistic picture, all by the chance of nature, slips away. But then I feel the smooth fabric of clothing on my skin and remember that that too is unnatural. I, too, am a skeleton clouded over by the influences of surrounding civilization. The river is redeemed, for I see myself as natural enough and therefore he is as well.
    As I entered high school, I walked into the boathouse thinking more of the river than of the sport. Following my first weeks of crew, I returned home to the river able to digest all parts of his identity. My eyes moved above the glassy surface to boathouses, old and new, casting their shadows on the water. Quickly these shadows transformed from unfitting darknesses to perfectly threaded patterns.
And so, given my attempt at tightening my perspective on the Charles, it only seemed fair when the local city council announced the inception of efforts to make the river’s waters suitable for human contact. This was the river’s way of, in return, reaching back to me. Although I had absolutely no interest in letting the grossly polluted water ever touch my skin, it was the symbolic manner of the announcement that struck me. Now, truly, the river would be left, to me, in its most natural state.
    Walking at his edge now, several years after the river-clean-up announcement, the water is still murky. My fifth-grade mind had imagined it to become an eerie pale see-through color without pollution. But now I realize the vast unlikeness of that prospect and am relieved. To what extent the de-polluting process has even occurred is unclear. The water itself, despite new wooden benches and adjacent repainted buildings, reflects my face and body back just as it always has, quivering slightly but still with little ambiguity. Neither of us appears to have changed much. The words of the figure walking on my other side float away down the dawdling drive as I am instead engaged in mute conversation with the ripples. The figure, my friend, seems to accept my silence and she continues talking with only mildly audible signs of displeasure. I don’t bother to try to feel guilty, or to tear my eyes away from him. Instead, we carry on with the same conduct and round the bend, the waters rounding it with us. This is how it always is. After all, we, the Charles and I, have grown up together.