Travels in Philadelphia/Along the Green Neshaminy
ALONG THE GREEN NESHAMINY
There are scenes so rich in color, so flooded with sunlight, that the hand hardly knows how to set them down. They seem to yearn for expression in what is called poetry, yet one fears to submit them to the bending and twisting of rhyme. For when one embarks on the ecstatic search for words in tune with one another he may find bright and jovial cadences, but rarely does he say just what was in his heart. How, then, may one order the mysterious mechanism that gears brain with forefinger so that the least possible color and contour be lost in transmission?
The other day I rowed up Neshaminy Creek. It is a bright little river seventeen miles or so from Philadelphia, a stripling of the great-hearted Delaware. Its wooded and meaded banks are a favored pleasuring ground for pavement-keeping souls, who set up a tent there in the summertime and cruise those innocent waters in canoes. It is a happy stream, beloved of picnic parties. Millions of hard-boiled eggs and ice cream cones have perished in the grove above the dam, and a long avenue of stately poplar trees has grown up to commemorate them. The picnicking point is known as Neshaminy Falls, though the falling is done mostly by high-spirited flappers on the entertaining toboggan chute, down which they launch themselves in a cheering line. The river falls tamely enough over a small dam; Niagara's prestige is nowhere menaced.
There is a kind of emergency fleet corporation doing a bustling traffic at the little plank landing stage. The chief navigating officer was toting a roll of bills larger than I can face with comfort. From him one hires a vessel of sorts, propelled by bright red oars, and then one sets forth up the stream. Most of the voyagers are content after passing the island, for the current, though sluggish, is persistent. But it is well to keep on. Neshaminy shows her rarest charms to those who woo her stoutly.
Above the island there is a long strip of thick woodland on both banks. The treetops, rising steeply into the bright air, keep tossing and trembling in the wind, but the stream itself is entirely still. Along the bank, where the great bleached trunks climb out of the water, there hangs the peculiar moist, earthy, pungent smell of a river that runs among woods. Every freshwater bather must know that smell. It has in it a dim taint as of decay, a sense of rotting vegetation. Yet it is a clean odor and a cool one. It is a smell particularly dear to me, for it recalls to my eager nostril the exact scent of the old bathing place on the Cherwell at Oxford, quaintly known as Parson's Pleasure. How vividly I remember that moist, cool corner of turf, the afternoon sunlight stabbing it with slanting arrows of gold, the enigmatic old Walt Whitman (called Cox) handing out damp towels from his dingy hutch, and the clean white bodies poised against green willows! Would it hurt Neshaminy's feelings if I were to confess that the poignance of its appeal to me was partly due to its kinship with the Oxford Cher?
A little farther up, the creek has the good sense to throw off its mantle of woods. Wide meadows come to the water's edge; hills of a friendly sort are folded down about it, showing a bare line of upland against the sky. A clean line of hill against the emptiness of blue is a sight that never tires. A country road crosses the stream on a flimsy bridge that leans on stout old stone piers. The road bends away uphill, among a wilderness of blackberry bushes, winding among pastures where the cows are grazing. That is a good kind of road; the sort of road one associates with bare feet and hot dust sifting between boyish toes.
Above this bridge the creek shallows. Through the clear water one sees the bottom humped with brown stones. Many of the larger boulders bear a little white paint stain on their upward ridges, showing where a venturesome excursionist has bumped one of the transports of the emergency fleet corporation. Dragonflies gleam like winged scarfpins. Under the boat flashes the bright shape of a small perch or sunfish. On the willow trunks that lean along the bank an occasional fisherman is watching his float. The current moves faster here, dimpling and twisting in little swirls. The water shines and glows: it seems to have caught whole acres of living sunlight. Far above a great hawk is lazily slanting and sliding, watching curiously to see the mail plane from Bustleton that passes up the valley every afternoon.
There is no peace like that of a little river, and here it is at its best.
At last we reached the point where, if the boat is to go further, it must be propelled by hand, the pilot walking barefoot in the stream. Easing her round sharp reefs, pushing through swift little passages where the current spurts deeply between larger stones, she may be pushed up to a huge tree trunk lying along the shore, surrounded by the deliciously soft and fluid mud loved by country urchins, the mud that schloops when one withdraws the sunken foot. Here, the world reduced to "a green thought in a green shade," one may watch the waterbirds tiptoeing and teetering over the shallows, catch the tune of the little rapids scuffling round the bend and eat whatever sandwiches are vouchsafed by the Lady of the White Hand. High above treetops and framing the view stands the enormous viaduct of the Trenton cutoff. A heavy freight train thundering over it now and then keeps one in touch with the straining world.
In the swift sparkle that bickers round the bend one may get a dip and a sprawl in the fashion that is in favor with those who love the scour of lightly running water over the naked flesh. That corner of the stream is remote and screened. There is a little gap between two shouldery stones where the creek pours itself chuckling and vehement. The bottom is grown with soft, spongy grasses that are very pleasant to squat upon. I presume that every man in the world takes any opportunity he can to wallow in a running brook. It is an old tradition, and there cannot be too much of it.
The little rivers are excellent friends of man. They are brisk, cheerful and full of quiet corners of sun. They are clear and clean, the terror of dark unknown waters is not in them. I have known and loved many such, and I hope to make friends with more. When I look back and reckon up the matters that are cause for regret there will not stand among them my private and pagan sluice in the bright water of Neshaminy.