Of all the symbols that writers, artists, philosophers, and composers have used throughout human history, water may be the most powerful metaphor for change.
Nine Ways to Cross a River is an extended meditation on midlife, nature, and the meaning of it all as seen from nine different river crossings. Akiko Busch’s choice to swim these rivers reflects her deeper desire to bridge the divides in her own life. The distance from bank to bank of a river is analogous but more manageable than the growing gap she senses between herself and her teenage sons, and also that between her younger self and the person she is at 50-odd years.
Busch’s particular genius is to make sweeping conceptual connections between the events of her daily existence and deeper questions about the human condition. The approach she takes is as much in opposition to a utilitarian view of natural resources as it is to the idea that swimming is essentially a competitive sport. Whether accompanied by one friend or in a group of a hundred, Busch simply swims from one side of each river to the other, mostly disregarding pessimistic warnings about pollution and absorbing what wisdom she can from the journey.
Mostly she seeks the feeling of being swept away by invisible currents, a counterpoint to her stable domestic life.
A casual swim in the Hudson shortly before September 11 inspired Busch’s travels to rivers as far afield as the Monongahela south of Pittsburgh and the Ohio, at the southern border between Illinois and Kentucky. The process of finding places to swim in a series of smaller river towns brings her into contact with an eccentric cast of characters. The most famous of these is folk singer Pete Seeger, an ardent conservationist who envisions a group Hudson River swim in which the faster swimmers start later than the slower ones so that everyone reaches the other side simultaneously. Other river folk, from fishermen to park rangers to casual boaters, regard their waterways with varying degrees of love, respect, suspicion, and outright passion.
Busch comes across as a sort of accidental activist, led toward an idealistic worldview by her experiences in these underappreciated, neglected, and abused rivers. I think the river-crossing endeavor, like the best journeys, took her out of her own concerns and into a world both bigger and more familiar than she anticipated.
Copyrights
Donna Blumenfeld. Swimming Against the Tide. Copyright 2007 Venus Zine.
