Quiet Nights I Listen to the River

Elizabeth Pattee Eklund

Sunrise on the Willamette River. Elizabeth Eklund

Usually I’m up early, well before the day noises have broken the spell of night. From my home on the west bank of the Willamette River, first light might be a dramatic rising sun. But many days the clouds are so heavy that the dawning day is little more than a notion that the sky has become less heavy. On such mornings, though I can’t see the sun, I am certain it is just behind that place where the heaviness of the clouds lightens. When the day doesn’t open in a burst of color, it unfolds in a slower version of grey—morning mists silhouetted by darker skies. Either way, there is no fanfare, no trumpets. The day begins as days do: quietly with light. The beginning is silence. These moments of silence are a precious gift.

Or they were anyway. In the past year I’ve received more gifts of silence than I might have liked: dark theatres, empty concert halls, solitary illnesses, unmet friends, and my own voice as a performing singer. A year of silence has accumulated to a year of insecurity and grief. Cascading moments of silence have nudged (sometimes shoved) me into different life patterns—to discover how to be “me” without the usual activities that costume my “self” in chosen identities. Day by day, night by night, forever at home, the river insists that I keep going, that I look again and listen afresh.

Unfazed by pandemic, the river is relentless and unstoppable. It carries entire trees and rain scoured mud through our town, to the mighty Columbia and out to sea. It ferries barking seals up stream past our home to feast on salmon and sturgeon at Willamette Falls. Our friends do not come to dinner anymore, but I hear the boisterous banquets of the birds, who do not eat in silence nor even at a polite conversational level. Gulls scream for the leavings of bigger beasts.  Eagles’ high-pitched calls reflect off the watery surface plowed by honkers and quackers. Ospreys plummet not just to the river’s surface but, with decidedly un-olympian form, splat their dives beneath the surface for a fresh meal. The day belies the precious silences of the dawn. With constant power and truth, the river continues to chisel its path in night quiet and day noise. It moves along as only it can, unapologetically and authentically itself, indifferent to pandemic, to protest, to human suffering and desire.

My eldest brother Ted is a fisherman. He always looks at the water, reading it for signs of the best fishing and crabbing spots, signs of coming weather, signs of life.  At my place, he gazes at the river and reminds me, “no time spent watching the water is wasted.” I believe him because he is my brother and because he always knows where to drop our traps and where to put out our lines.  I believe him because of all the boisterous feasts our family has celebrated together, enjoying our catch of salmon, bass, halibut and crab, late into the cool nights.

Quiet nights I listen to the river, which loses not a single moment to stillness or rest. While I’m restless myself, I find reassurance in the river’s constant drone, which accompanies the andante of my heartbeat. I hear it finding its way, murmuring its constancy, humming truth as soothing as a cherished melody. At home, where I have spent this past year, I’ve found a new way to be myself, by being present to the music and truth, the day sounds and nighttime courage of the river. 

Elizabeth Pattee Eklund is a native of Portland, Oregon.  She is a trained singer and teacher (NATS) a mother, grandmother and, in COVID time, a neighborhood DJ.