Water Buffalos and River Dreams

Wissahickon Valley Park- view near the covered bridge, by Laelia Watt 2024

Wissahickon Creek flowed imperceptibly in the area I chose to relax. I found a large flat boulder, perfect for sitting to write in a small notebook I brought along to work through ideas. The trees along the river mirrored on the surface of the water. Since I had never visited the park before, I planned to take time to absorb the experience rather than hit the trails. After an hour of sketching out notes and working through life conundrums with pen to paper, my rear end was ready to move off the rock, so I wandered around the restaurant and bridges nearby for people and bird watching. I enjoyed the place so much, I returned the next day to walk six miles along the Forbidden Drive path. The name is ironic, because it is the main path frequented by visitors of every age and ability, and complete with level surfaces, pedestrian and bike friendly gravel, and varying highlights along the way. Clearly not Forbidden!

My relatives joke that we are a family of water buffalos. We love spending time around or in water. Both of my parents grew up on Long Island (you know, land surrounded by water), but also my mom lived two blocks from the L.I. Sound and my dad’s house was fifty feet from the Nissequogue River. I was born in Missouri, a state with plentiful rivers, and besides the Muddy Mississippi which runs along the eastern border, the rivers boast clear water perfect for canoe trips and swimming. Every summer, our family traveled to Long Island to spend time with our families in the water or near it. While I can’t swim well, I can spend hours standing or splashing in water. I learned to steer a canoe when I was in elementary school.

As I sat on the rock by Wissahickon Creek, I thought about the flow of my life, how I had moved incessantly between towns, states and regions of the US. The nomad life didn’t stop as an adult since I moved from Missouri to attend school in Arizona, then moved a few more times trying to crawl my way out of poverty in the aftermath of the economic crash that happened as I finished college. Despite its stunning beauty, in the desert of Tucson, I missed the four seasons, green trees, and beautiful rivers of my home state Missouri, so I moved back to St. Louis after I graduated. I didn’t expect the financial suffering I experienced during that time. My dreams of taking day trips to canoe the clear waters of the rivers in Missouri were dashed when I hardly had money to buy food, let alone to maintain ownership of a car, or pay for gas to the nearest state park and rent a canoe. Even once I finally found a job in my intended career, after two years of hard labor as an Animal Care Technician, I had to crawl my way back from a debilitating work-related repetitive use injury which sent me to live in Texas with my sister. I worked in retail for a few years since it didn’t require extensive use of my arms. Once I started healing and was able to use my hands for things like typing again, I started thinking about the possibilities for my life. I procured a job in my second-choice career- as a secretary in a school, but did I want to stay in Texas when it hadn’t been where I intended to build my life? I considered setting up life in peaceful Kentucky near my dear cousins since I visited them there and enjoyed the quiet and the lovely rivers. I started applying to jobs in their area. Then the pandemic hit. I was thankful to have my job in the school during that time, but I kept applying to jobs in Kentucky until 2021 when my sister announced that my brother-in-law was offered a job on the east coast. They invited me to move with them, and since I hadn’t had a single lead in KY for two years of applying, I joined them in New Jersey.

The region had everything I had wanted in a home after graduation. The seasons were varied, but not extreme in heat or cold. We have access to forests, beaches, major cities, small towns, country farms, and manicured stately gardens to visit, along with sprawling parks. The Arts community in this region is more robust than any other I considered. It was not the place I intended to make my home after college, but the location exceeds my expectations upon each new discovery. Besides that, we found an amazing rehabilitative massage business nearby that has helped me so much, I was able to start playing my cello more extensively than I had since 2016.

In my twenties, I read a book called “To be Told” by Dan Allender. It is a book written from a Christian perspective, but the themes are universally helpful. In the book, the author encourages the reader to think about their life in context of story. As a creative writing student, I appreciated this idea. Allender’s suggestion to picture my life as a whole with a beginning, middle, and end helped me to connect the various twists and turns that my life had taken. He writes to consider all the good and painful things that have happened and find common themes in the story like I would in one of my literature classes dissecting a classic text. Once I noticed the themes in my story, I applied the themes in my daily life more deliberately. Seeing my life as cohesive story helped make sense of all the upheaval I had experienced. I was able to think clearly enough to make more empowered choices and lean into the path that made sense for my unfolding narrative. Rather than living like I was a boat on the raging river rapids of life, my life felt more LIKE a river, flowing from the source on its way out to sea. If I imagine my life as a river, along the way, my waters are churned by rocky terrain, or stilled by deep pools, like the glassy pools of the Wissahickon I sat by to write, or plummeted emotional experiences, like water careening from cliffs in terrifying, yet majestic waterfalls like I saw in Yosemite. Life is a mixed bag.

Either way, I have more autonomy than a river, and while the story I am living has twists and turns out of my control, I felt empowered to choose more of the things I love. Even in the midst of the financial woes, the physical limitations, and dashed dreams, I added more time doing art in my day. I joined choirs. If I couldn’t make it to an epic nature adventure, I could find a local park to explore by bus or sit outside noticing the birds on the dilapidated buildings. When I couldn’t use my arms to do the animal care career I trained to do, I chose to work in beautiful jewelry stores or inspiring art supply stores. When I was left with few choices, it felt good, life-giving, to have the freedom to make SOME choices. Because of this thought exercise of thinking about my life in context of a story unfolding, after I was left unable to play my cello due to the work injury, I remembered a childhood dream of wishing I could take voice lessons. We didn’t have a lot of money growing up, so cello lessons were not always available, let alone voice lessons on top of that, but when I was able to afford it and found a teacher in one of the choirs I was in, I started voice lessons. It continues to heal and change my life in ways I didn’t expect.

Water, particularly in river form, is a major theme of my life. Some of my earliest memories involve rivers, and looking back, I see that a lot of my dreams for my life revolve around access to rivers. This makes sense for me coming from a family of “water buffalos”, but I didn’t realize how strong this theme was until I sat on that rock by the Wissahickon Creek. There I was in a huge, populated park in a major metropolitan city experiencing a sense of calm and wholeness I didn’t realize was missing. I felt relaxed in the ocean waves or walking around the lake by my work, but this river-like creek with its clear water, towering green trees on either side, and stone bridges reaching across it elicited an echo from my past that called me to reach for my dreams again. I want to feel the flow of my life, connected in all its disparate experiences. I want to feel the power and energy of my life forging paths into the earth where I travel in creativity and in love, bringing refreshment to those who travel alongside me.