Meander Scar

I think water lends itself to a lot of metaphors for life’s journey. It’s free flow and patient, slow progress are two qualities to which many of us would like to aspire. Today, while speaking with someone at work about the way that rivers serve as boundaries for some some states and localities, we got out an atlas and began to look at rivers, their doglegs and curves and billabo

ngs, and how they are constantly changing. Logically, you would think that the force of water falling down to the ocean would produce straight, succinct fall lines following the path of least resistance. But if you get a map out, you can look at the Mississippi or much of the ancient New River in West Virginia or the James right here in Virginia, and they are all a series of twists and turns, a slalom of loops and arches. When you think about it, it doesn’t make sense why streams would have undulations in their trajectory, and you'd think that millions of years would have produced a deep, direct channel from mountain to outfall. However, in the course of a river’s journey, once in a while, a large boulder or two are nicked from the shoreline and fall into the channel, creating an obstacle for water, and sticks and sediment gather behind it. Eventually, the river flows on one side of the obstruction or the other, and the river develops a bend, reinforced with years of leaf litter, sand and gravel, all resulting from that initial boulder or fallen tree.

Over millennia, the riverbends grow and shrink, leaving behind folds of rich silt that result in nutritious streamside forests or swamps, and these areas are known as meander scars. Recently, I have spoken to several friends and family who told me of their journey in life, and how it has not been the straightforward voyage they would have anticipated. Obstacles, large and small have crowded their way and they have had to work around them, but what has resulted, they have described, seems to me to have been meander scars, or their beginnings, fertile folds of rich loam that have given way to an unanticipated explosion of life. It just reminds me than despite our best intentions and focused ambitions, that maybe the best parts of life are our meander scars, those places where a single, sometimes devastating obstacle has forced the entire course to change, leaving nothing but new life in its wake. And when those obstacles are still fresh, and water is still bending in a torrent away from them, we can look forward to the build up of silt and detritus that will one day be, hopefully, a meander scar.