In It
Nine months ago I moved into a townhouse on the south side of Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, no more than fifty yards from the Susquehanna, the longest river in this part of the country. I understood what it can do, had shoveled sludge out of west-side basements seven years ago, dragged water-logged carpets to the curb, and hoisted five-gallon pails filled with muck and rock, wire and glass through other people’s window wells. Back then, I lived in a house above the floodplain, but now, just a stone’s throw from the water, I’m in it.
Rising
Two months later, several days of rain in northeast Pennsylvania saturates the ground, fills streams and creeks draining into the Susquehanna, and pushes the river out of its banks. I watch anxiously from an upstairs window as the water rises and wonder how quickly it might cross the road and threaten the ground floor. In the Dockside RV Park across the street, a fat man in shorts and a yellow rain jacket with the hood up tramps through the mud in the downpour. A clap of thunder vibrates my window as he wags the fingers of his left hand at the woman backing a dually pickup towards one of only two campers still parked there. When the man yells and drops his arm, the truck’s brake lights reflect off the front of the camper. He clamps the hitch on the ball, cranks up the jack, puts the blocks in the truck box, and gets behind the wheel. The duals spin, and the tail of the truck slips left before getting traction and hauling the camper through a track in the grass to the gravel driveway and onto Fort McClure Boulevard.
By that evening, water covers all eleven RV pads, and by mid afternoon the following day, the three-foot-tall hookup boxes are entirely submerged. The main channel is adrift with Gatorade bottles, pale one-gallon milk jugs, limbs and logs, a soccer ball, plastic soda and water bottles, aluminum cans, and an endless spectacle of refuse bobbing in the brown current and coursing around the pillars of the bridge. “If the swollen Susquehanna River looks browner than usual,” Ed Lewis of the Times Leader reported a couple days later, “that could be due to the nearly 35 million gallons of untreated waste discharged into the river by the City of Binghamton, N.Y…. The discharge… lasted for almost 103 hours, or more than four days.”
On August 15th, the river crests in Bloomsburg at 22.74 feet, more than 3½ feet above flood stage but far below historic crests of 32.75 feet seven years ago as a result of Tropical Storm Lee, 32.7 feet in March 1904 when massive ice jams choked the river, and 31.2 feet in June 1972 because of Tropical Storm Agnes.
Any one of those would mean several feet of water in my kitchen and living room, but the river recedes before reaching the road.
Migrants
On the last of August, I lean on the sill of the open upstairs window and gaze out. The air is warm, the red tinge of sumac on the far side of the river smolders through the late summer haze, and mare’s tails drift high above the hills. The flags on the bridge flap lazily over the passing traffic, and for the first time I see him on the dead limb jutting above the woolly crown of trees that stand between the street and the water: a bald eagle, the white head stark above the hooked beak, the dark wings and chest a still shadow against the blue sky.
A week later in the morning, a second eagle perches below him on the lower fork of the same dead limb. Both face upstream while below them an SUV, a Rent-a-Center truck, cars, and a black pickup with chrome dual exhaust rising behind the cab cross the bridge toward Catawissa. One twists his head around and preens a wing before shaking himself, his ruffled feathers rising like the hair on the neck of a mad dog and then settling across his sleek back. Several mornings over the next two weeks I see them on the same limb, but by mid-September they’re gone, likely following the Appalachians to where the river, after meandering southwest for miles, turns east again, and they meet and follow the last warmth of summer toward the Chesapeake Bay.
Hard Freeze
Wearing a black stocking cap, gray gloves, and a heavy coat, I walk across the street and trudge over the snow covering the RV park’s gravel track down to the river. It’s about eight degrees out this January afternoon, and a strong northwest wind funnels Canadian air through the valley. Overhead, the peregrine falcon I often see from my upstairs window hunches on the limb rising above the other trees. Ice floes drift downstream like battered barges, some gathering in a cold flotilla in the middle of the channel, others scraping and turning against the frozen shore like cogs in the machinery of water, grinding along on broken teeth.
I walk next to the river and pass near a bare sapling, its trunk no thicker than my thumb. It rises four feet and then bends into the water, its boughs dangling in the slow current near the shore. Overnight small panes of ice grew horizontally around each frail limb, like hand guards on thin daggers. As a jagged floe rides the shoreline, it pushes the limbs out of the water, and the ice clinging to them scrapes and jangles across the floe’s crystal teeth like a music box mechanism, glassy notes rattling in the brittle air.
The Way
I stand in the kitchen and pour a cup of coffee on a cold February morning when the valley fills with the growl of an approaching freight train on the Norfolk Southern track above the opposite shore of the river. The sound swells into a steady drumming, so I set down the coffee and hurry upstairs. A brilliant shaft of sunlight fills the window, and its blinding reflection glitters off the moving water. The rumble of the straining engines rolling under the bridge and through the bare trees gives way to the clack and creak of boxcars, tank wagons, covered hoppers, and flatcars. Then, as the end of the train slips out of sight, I turn and start back down the stairs — the river steadily southbound, the eagles and falcons content on some distant limb — and I see how clearly I’ve put myself in the way of the world.
