Tunesday: Take Me to the River

Take Me to the River

(Green, Al) As Performed by Talking Heads

I don't know why I love her like I do
All the changes you put me through
Take my money, my cigarettes
I haven't seen the worst of it yet
I wanna know that you'll tell me
I love to stay
Take me to the river, drop me in the water
Take me to the river, dip me in the water
Washing me down, washing me down

I don't know why you treat me so bad
Think of all the things we could have had
Love is an ocean that I can't forget
My sweet sixteen I would never regret

I wanna know that you'll tell me
I love to stay
Take me to the river, drop me in the water
Push me in the river, dip me in the water
Washing me down, washing me

Hug me, squeeze me, love me, tease me
Till I can't, till I can't, till I can't take no more of it
Take me to the water, drop me in the river
Push me in the water, drop me in the river
Washing me down, washing me down

I don't know why I love you like I do
All the troubles you put me through
Sixteen candles there on my wall
And here am I the biggest fool of them all

I wanna know that you'll tell me
I love to stay
Take me to the river and drop me in the water
Dip me in the river, drop me in the water
Washing me down, washing me down.

I'm a person of passing obsessions - something grabs my brain, it's all I can think about, and then I'm on to the next thing, whether or not that latest obsession has been fully explored - and the thing that's currently obsessing me is a desire to research and experience the river that runs through the town I live in. Random, right? So, some context:

I've been reading Birds by the Shore this week, and it's a memoir by a person with a rather ordinary life, but a person nonetheless who is open and present to her surroundings. I've read plenty of memoirs like this - by people who are either curious about where they are or who take the leap and go explore somewhere even more exotic - and it makes me think that I don't need to go hike the Pacific Coast Trail like Cheryl Strayed, or walk the Camino de Santiago, safari in South Africa; I reckon there must be something adventure worthy in my own backyard. And then I started thinking about the Grand River and realised that I know so little about it: we've lived in Cambridge for twenty-two years now - three times longer than I've lived anywhere before - and it seemed a shame to me that I haven't really experienced the river. As in the header photo, we have gone for many family car rides that ended with an ice cream from L. A. Frank's, always eaten riverside as we watch the ducks. I took the girls a couple times for the fall colours hike that used to happen along the river every Thanksgiving weekend, and Dave and I retraced that path a few times later with the girls in the trailer behind our bikes. The girls were in a summer camp once that included a canoe trip down the river, and Dave and I went down to look at the river a couple of years ago as it was flooding and churning and threatening to overflow its concrete embankments in the downtown Galt area. We've eaten many times at the Cambridge Mill restaurant - which is one of a series of converted mills along the Grand River - and I think that's about all we've done on and near our renowned local waterway. So I decided to see what else there was, and boy, was I floored by the options. Here's my top three adventures planned for this summer:

1) Go white water tubing at the Elora Gorge. (There's also a lazy river option with a private company that lasts four to five hours and might be the safer plan for a not great swimmer like myself.)

2) Whisper to the Moon Paranormal Night Paddle: Meet at dusk and go for a canoe trip with Haudenosaunee Guides (who are also paranormal investigators) down the Grand River towards a purportedly haunted mansion. (This totally spooks me out, but we're all pretty stoked about it.)

3) And this may make me look like a schmuck, but my third top option is to go with Great Lakes Helicopter Tours for a bird's-eye view of the Grand River, which travels from the local airport to a coffee shop in a town south of here, lands (presumably so we can exit the helicopter like douchebag celebrities to get our coffees), and then returns home again. Totally schmucky, but Dave and I are excited by the whole idea.

Dave and I are also talking about entering the Tour de Grand - a local bicycle event in which participants can choose between a variety of routes, between 10 and 160 km long (we're looking at the 25) - and while it's only partially along the riverside, it fulfills this idea of being more open to and participatory in the local scene. If we like our canoe trip, we might consider doing another one along the stretch of the Grand known as Big Creek - also called "the Canadian Amazon" for the jungly tree canopy and plenty of wildlife. There's camping and catch-and-release fly fishing; we could go for a drive to seek the river's source and where it empties into Lake Erie; we're open to a wide variety of experiences and who knows what else we might discover to do. I'm pretty excited about the whole idea - it's my current serial obsession after all - and I love that Dave and the girls want to participate, too. Take me to the river, drop me in the water, washing me down.

*Later edit: I have been enthusiastically sharing my plans with anyone who'll listen (which is everyone I corner), and it's amazing how many other long-time residents of the area had no idea that all of this was out there either. When I was telling Carrie (from work and book club), she said that by coincidence, she and her church group had just heard about (and booked) a dinner cruise down the Grand River for this summer - and now that's on my list, too.