Tom Key

Each "story" begins with an introduction to one of the great Rivers of the world. And then drops into a mash-up of dreams, vignettes, biographical snap-shots of possibly real and certainly magical people, and then reveals a connection between what preceded the chapter. It is, of course, a river but not wet.

Amazon - she is described falling from Andean ice-melt through rugged rock rapids into a great basin of green and the river snaked -- they all say snaked -- through it slowly conjoined into a great brown meander toward the great mouth pushing the Pacific swells.

A boy learns to make a long bow and longer arrows, smokes the mosquitoes, and one day finds an overgrown moat. Behind the moat, a berm hidden in the jungle. Lifting a hardwood beam, he finds exposed at his feet, an instrument. Mysterious, but by experiment and practice he learns to play it and sings duets with it.

He travels down the river, singing. Meets missionaries and rubber traders, falls in love and kills a man. Escapes to Europe.

Volga - The strelka -- the arrow -- formed where the land comes to a point honed by the meeting of the Volga and its tributary is the headland of ancient Yaroslavl'. Standing in the belfry of a 12th century monastery, a young man tries to replace the clapper which was missing. Thinks in his mind:

It's a kind of magic
The bell that rings inside your mind
Is challenging the doors of time
It's a kind of magic
The waiting seems eternity
The day will dawn of sanity
Ooh ooh ooh ooh
Is this a kind of magic?
It's a kind of magic
There can be only one
This rage that lasts a thousand years
Will soon be done
This flame that burns inside of me
I'm hearing secret harmonies
It's a kind of magic
The bell that rings inside your mind
Is challenging the doors of time

Over the next few weeks, the man is able to forge a new clapper like the others in the peal, and now the bells ring together. He looks up at the gilded domes of the monastery cathedral and wonders if god licked the gleaming surfaces to make the gold gleam. The matushka--little mother, the name Russians call this river--had the same gleam in the evening light. But it was cold, and the wind began spitting snow. For 2000 years men brought their women to this strelka and made homes, finally building the monastery. For 2000 years women brought their men to the river when it was frozen three feet thick, pulling sleds on its great highway through the forest. The man looked at the treeline, and knew that bears would have been worshiped there. But now, along the high right bank of the Volga, opposite the flatland of the left bank stretching away to the East, a kremlin was first raised, a wooden fortress, and replaced over centuries to the great stone wall standing today, made by layers of politics and brute force.

The young man takes the train to the first of the twelve hydroelectric stations that make up the Volga-Kama Cascade, as it was prettily-named by the hydromaniacs of the Soviet engineers. He rejoins the river below Kazan, where it is joined by its greatest tributaries, the Oka, and then the Kama. Below the Zhiguli Hills the landscape is bare almost treeless steppe, and in the brief Spring, filled with green and small patches of flowering herb. Into its floodplain, the Volga heads south, into looping interconnected channels, and the young man passes many islands.

In the middle Volga is where the Big Ism began, in a town called Simbirsk. (It's name was changed, as almost all names changed with the wind of Isms) to Ul'yanovsk to honor the famous Vladimir Ilyich Ul'yanov, who had changed his name already, to Lenin, as he fled from the Tsar's police. Of course, the revenant deification of Lenin keeps Simbirsk-renamed afloat. The young man just wanted to see the place.

The city had monuments, mostly effaced by time and ironic adorations and hostilities. Lenin's schoolroom desk still sits, now museum'ed, last in the row by the window, where children were filing by to be permitted to sit on the precious space and moment as the guide explained "for their first lesson in life".

The young man walks down from the memorial to the river--from the high bank, looking at the lean, slate-bottomed and topped cargo ships chugging up and down stream. Then at his feet, he was surprised to see a long arrow.… (mais)