Rivers and Roads

Travelling by bus up to Boston this past weekend, I was lead again to think about travel and the infrastructure surrounding transportation. I've always been fascinated with the idea of roads as long lines connecting destinations with a multitude of various options. It is impressive to me that you can possibly get between most any two points on one body of land without leaving a continuous strip of planned pavement. I find it so interesting to identify with a road or piece of highway on an every day, local level and then expand your perspective of it as you travel distances into other neighborhoods or states, witnessing changes of the highway's surroundings.

I attended a wedding reception located on the 16th floor of a building upstream and across the Charles River from Boston. The view was truly spectacular and no one had been aware before that a public place with this view existed, although for many years I would bring visitors to the same (Cambridge) side of the river to look back on Boston from esplanade level.

The bus ride back through Connecticut encountered the crossing of several other rivers and I began thinking about the relationship between place, street, and river. I realized that I know sections of rivers in relation to the city that was founded on them. There is the Charles River I associate first with Boston, the Hudson I associate first with Manhattan, and then some small towns like Beacon that I've stopped on. Not being a boater, it's more difficult for me to see the larger context of the river as a linear element connecting places. The bus crossed a broad river opening just south of Stamford, which I've crossed plenty of times on the same route, but it occured to me just today that it may very well originate around the same area as the Hudson, which I'm so much more familiar with.

I realize that I am typically viewing rivers from this 90 degree angle, either crossing them or standing at a bank - rarely getting a longer picture than a typical cone of vision. It seems ironic that I can know and understand the places founded on the banks of a river without understanding or knowing the river. The rivers have been here so much longer than the cities, and were at some point, the primary means of discovering places (and later of transportation and shipping). In the time of the Europeans exploring the Hudson, it was not the river that runs by New York, but instead it was a route banked by the wild and the unknown. I realize that it's not so long ago that it was the river that connected mapped points over long distances, not a man made highway.