Later this week (after a journey by air) I'll take a harbor cruise on Lake Superior, a place I've never been before, though I've just learned that the lake water flows eventually and most circuitously into the St. Lawrence River, which I have seen and noted in Quebec, and that its name in Ojibwe is gitchi-gami, flowing in its turn into Longfellow's poem "The Song of Hiawatha" which I came across in school ages ago.
The flow of words takes me (circuitously too) back into letters and journals, which find me staying in "a green-roofed attic high above the St. Lawrence River in Vieux-Québec," seeing "the blue copper roofs above the St. Lawrence River in old Quebec," and reading The Cleaner of Chartres, "which sent me off on a quest after porc aux pruneaux—which morphed into chicken with prune and mustard sauce, which I'm making for tonight's dinner. Next time it will be lamb tagine with prunes and apricots. I first found prunes as an ingredient in meat dishes and pies in old Quebec City, as I was walking around checking menus, high above the St. Lawrence River."
In June 2012 I wrote "I do love being on the water. One of my favorite ways of exploring a new place is to take a boat ride around it—whether an architecture river cruise in Chicago, a ferry to Tiburon or Sausalito with views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the diminished San Francisco skyline, a cruise on the slow green river below Durham Cathedral, a ferry from Boston down to Cape Cod, a kayak trip down the irrigation ditch in Kohala, a ride around the San Juan Islands or to Victoria, BC, a hydrofoil up Lago di Como or from Crete to Santorini, a rowboat on Wisconsin’s Bone Lake, or a paddlewheeler down the Mississippi from New Orleans."
And back in August 2009, just looking out at boats, "It’s good to be back in Chicago, one of my favorite big-cities-away-from-home (along with Boston’s Back Bay, midtown Manhattan, and Washington, DC up near the cathedral and zoo). Despite the early hour, it’s pleasant to walk to work along the green river, under a lofty drawbridge, with architecture tour boats moored quietly along the opposite bank, impressive buildings rising all around. To see the reflection of sky and clouds in a new hotel, on my way to the Corner Bakery for decaf espresso and croissants. Then later in the day, sprung from the windowless, timeless exhibit hall, it’s reviving to see the play of fireboats and water taxis on their journeys to and from the lake, to sit with sandwich and notebook watching the wakes erasing as they go and the contemplative sparkle of sun. And when the night comes on again the enchantment of lights reflected, multiplied, and with them unarticulated yearnings for things past or out of reach, the far places in me I long for and am always already leaving again."
And finally, further back and much farther away, sometime in the late 1980s, I noted the details of a journey by water among many in Greece, this from Santorini: "There is room for only one boat to dock at the volcano, so the three or four that came after just tied up to the first and we disembarked by being handed across all the boats in turn—a bridge of boats. After climbing we sailed around to the other side of the New Burned Island and went swimming off the boat, in thermal waters. There was a small white church in the cove, and above it a cave with an outhouse in it overrun with goats."
All this especially luring, probably, because my birthplace was landlocked, and water so scarce there. Boat journeys came to seem the stuff of fairy tales.
image: Henry Holiday, Sappho and Phaon
Ashmolean Museum, photo by Christie Cochrell
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