As well as being the river's biography in space and time, this book is about how two artists perceive the river and have come to understand its importance to the part of the planet that it flows through. In images and words we reflect on “riverness”, the private life of rivers, the dialogue between land and water, the connections with vegetation and climate and weather, with humans and their works.
I had an epiphany of sorts last spring: After reading a lovely little book by an author observing and interacting with her seaside environment, I initially thought, “Well, it's easy to have an interesting life when you live somewhere interesting.” But then I reconsidered: We all live somewhere, probably everyone lives somewhere that would seem an adventure to outsiders, and after the briefest of consideration, I decided to spend the summer really exploring the Grand River – a local three hundred kilometre-long waterway given the rare designation as a Heritage River by the Canadian government – and it took very little Googling to draw up an exciting itinerary for me and Dave to accomplish. By summer's end: we tubed and canoed the river; hiked and biked the riverside trails; attended sunrise water ceremonies with Anishinaabe women and a full-moonlit night paddle with Six Nations paranormal investigators; we had champagne picnics and dinner on a riverboat; and in our capstone coup de grace, we hired a helicopter to fly us between the riverbanks just as the trees reached the height of their autumnal hues. Nothing could be more fitting, therefore, than for me to have received this beautiful book of wood carvings and essays – created by local brother and sister artists, Gerard Brender à Brandis and Marianne Brandis – that explore the Grand River from its source in Dundalk to its outlet into Lake Erie. And although it's not quite the book that Dave thought he was giving me (The Grand River is more about the settlements along the way than the river itself), this was a perfectly interesting read for me and has inspired a new itinerary for next year.
At water level, in the Elora Gorge, the river has a very different feel than it does when viewed from above. The cliffs are high and in many places overhanging, but the depth of the gorge is not as insistently present to the senses: rather one focuses on the river and its bed, on the banks and boulders where water and rock meet. The human visitor sees the place from the river's point of view: for it, the upper levels of the cliffs are no longer relevant, except when there are rockfalls. Thousands of years have passed since it worked on them, and it is now busy with other tasks of river-making.Gerald's wood carvings perfectly capture settings along the Grand River and the time and effort that this method of image-making entail seem fitting for the subject; anyone can snap pictures with their phone (as I did) but carving images into wood chimes with the way the moving water carves away at rock and soil. Marianne's accompanying essays give an interesting and informative overview of the waterway's history, but if I had a complaint it would be that the pair too often concentrated on the buildings (and therefore the history) of nineteenth century settlers and industrialists; their mills and mansions took precedence over the river itself with its flora and fauna, too often leading to something like the following (about the Alexander Graham Bell homestead in Brantford):
Though only a short part of his life was spent in southern Ontario, Bell is connected to the Grand River because the first two of his longer telephone calls were made between Brantford and Mount Pleasant (six and a half kilometres away) and between Brantford and Paris, Ontario...Like the watershed's, Bell's work is all about connections.Concentrating on the nineteenth century European settlers and their buildings also causes the history of the area to kind of skim over First Nations' presence; and while Joseph Brant and his leading of the Six Nations into the area after the War of 1812 is explained, the implications of unsettled land claims (which will be a huge factor in the future of the Grand River and its management) isn't covered at all. Even so, I was always interested in the information that was included here and felt, as I had all summer, that others had known all along that the Grand River is a fascinating place to explore and has relevance beyond the local:
One of the aspects of the Grand River's “riverness” is its function as a living laboratory: you can almost hear the dialogue between who had an impact on the river in the past, and the river's replies, and the responses of those living with and managing the river now. Back and forth the dialogue goes, with contributions from all the components of the ecosystem. Learning to understand this conversation is a major task for today's river managers and scientists, and it has implications for planet-wide water issues because, again, all rivers behave in much the same way. What works in one place is at least worth trying somewhere else.Some of what I learned: Early settlers cut down ninety-five per cent of the forest to the river's banks, leading to flooding and erosion, and has now been replanted back to almost twenty per cent of what it was before; the ecologically significant Carolinian forests along the river's southern reaches are moving ever-northward as the climate warms; there used to be canals and locks to join the Grand River with the Erie Canal but the railway (now defunct) made the waterway obsolete; and maybe most importantly – where I live is the only urbanised stretch of the Grand River, which likely explains why I never before thought of it as a natural area worth exploring (we have high concrete embankments, meant to manage flooding, and which can be seen as the setting of “the hanging wall” in the television adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale, which is filmed in our downtown). Overall, the content of this book was perfectly suited to my interests, and with the lovely woodcuts set on heavy paper, a joy to hold and a pleasure to own.
