When recalling childhood visits to Perkiomen Creek in Pennsylvania, Alison Townsend interrogates her younger self: “What did it mean that I was alive, human, a girl with wet braids, trailing her fingers in the water until they were wrinkled and pale?”
That question is one of several Townsend, a poet and UW-Whitewater professor, poses for herself (and the reader) in her new book, The Persistence of Rivers: An Essay on Moving Water.
Rivers is part memoir, part meditation, spanning Townsend’s whole life, describing the rivers that she knows “as surely as if [she] had been born with their courses inscribed in [her] palm.”
Across several states (and several states of mind), Townsend reflects how these rivers shaped her as a person and, broadly speaking, their shaping potential. Like a river, Townsend’s prose stops and starts in flow, sometimes lingering in ruminant oxbows, other times rushing headlong.
The “oxbow” portions are where Townsend’s sensibilities surge strongest, whether she’s reflecting on the indelible sound of river names — such as North Salem, New York’s Titicus, which “unfolds in [her] mouth like a rare spice” — or reflecting on the healing power of rivers. After a nervous breakdown, Townsend recovered, in part, by walking upstream through Oregon’s Marys River, which “offered comfort in ways that had nothing to do with language.”
The Persistence of Rivers makes liberal use of quotes from venerable environmental writers such as Rachel Carson, Wallace Stegner, Barry Lopez and Gretel Ehrlich. Like riverbanks, their words help shape the course of Townsend’s writing.
Townsend admits she is “a still-ambivalent transplant to Wisconsin,” but in the stirring closing chapter of Rivers, she confesses the Yahara has perhaps affected her more than any other river in her life. While not as beautiful or pure as, say, Marys River, the Yahara nonetheless nourishes her as it feeds Madison’s famous four lakes (Mendota, Monona, Waubesa, Kegonsa), “running like a silky umbilicus between them.”
Alison Townsend reads from her new book May 19 at Mystery to Me, 7 p.m.