I have long loved the
title of Norman Maclean’s 1976 autobiographical novella, A River Runs Through
It, which Robert Redford turned into a stunning 1992 film, starring Brad Pitt
and Craig Sheffer. In fact, I’ve envied him that title and wished it were mine,
because it so aptly describes my home town. Different river, different state,
different landscape, different era, a different kind of fishing and hiking, but
a lot of shared sentiments about the importance and symbolism of flowing water
in the life of a young man.
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The three bridges in our town were a lot like
the Steel girder one shown in this WPA photo.
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The Ohio county that I
grew up in and the main street in Wapakoneta, my home town, were named after
“my” river, the “mighty Auglaize”. It runs right through the middle of town,
parallel to the main (Auglaize) street, which is why our tiny little town needs
three main bridges (the Blackhoof Street Bridge, the Hamilton Road Bridge and
the Harrison Street Bridge), all of which have since been rebuilt as concrete
abutment bridges but which, when I was growing up, were the typical steel
girder bridges built in the 1930s under the Roosevelt administration’s famous
WPA employment program. That same
program, to get the nation’s laid-off laborers back to work and to promote
progress following the crippling Great Depression, was also responsible for the
building of our Post Office (still headquarters for the town’s mail today) and
the public swimming pool (a welcome and delightful addition to the summers of
generations of the town’s youth since then).
Although some local
historians have sought to convince people that the name Auglaize comes from the
Ottawa or Shawnee dialects (perhaps because of some conservative Midwestern
prejudice against all things Gallic) and that it means “fallen timbers”, it is
almost certainly of French origin.
Besides, I recently read on a Shawnee Nation webpage that our Native
American precursors in the region called the river Kathinakithiipi, so I figure
that particular Auglaize-origin myth is pretty well busted. The linguistic structure is most probably
built on the French words eau (water) and glaise (as in terre glaise, meaning
clay), which, if you observe the coffee-and-cream color of the river when it
runs high and fast in the spring, makes a lot of sense. But there’s still
another theory among Ohio historians that claims the name is a bastardization
of the French words eau and glace, and means frozen waters. If you’d ever seen
the Auglaize in the harsh winters of my youth—every “elder generation” of
Ohioans posits that there were never any winters as cold and snowy as their
winters, and we used to roll our eyes when our parents and grandparents said it
but, by golly, global warming might just be proving right every one of those
successive generations since the dawn of the Industrial Age—that theory would
also make sense to you.
Until we were forced to
study Ohio History in junior high, however, for most of us kids, Auglaize was a
name that seemed as American as John
Wayne and apple pie, because of its familiarity to us—our river, our main street,
our county, all Auglaize. Why, even the
first line of our Alma Mater anthem contained a reference to it: “There’s a
high school in Ohio / On the banks of the Auglaize / And to her we each say I
owe / Thee a heartfelt song of praise...”
When I first proudly spoke
of the Auglaize to Virginia, my exchange student girlfriend-and-wife-to-be,
back when we were both 18 years old, she observed it dubiously from the
Hamilton Road Bridge, then looked at me with a wry smile and said, “You call
this a river? A stream maybe, a trickle...but a river? Hardly!”
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| The River Plate, so broad you can't see the other side. |
But then, you have to
understand, she’s a Buenos Aires girl, a porteña, who grew up on the vast
estuary of the River Plate, into which the great rivers of South America all
pour their flow, a vast expanse of lion-colored water so wide you can’t see the
other side, 25 miles across to Uruguay
at its narrowest point, so enormous that the first Spanish explorers marked it
on their maritime charts as Mar Dulce (literally, freshwater sea), a muddy
giant that stains the Atlantic a tawny yellow for miles on end where it belches
into the ocean surf. So I suppose she can be forgiven such blasphemy, since she
comes from the banks of the widest and most voluminous river of all. But,
frankly, we usually wouldn’t put up with such impudence, even from somebody who
lived on the broad Ohio or the mile-wide Mississippi, because the Auglaize has
had its moments in the limelight of Ohio history (as I’ve mentioned here
before) and is something of an oddity in a region where the natural flow seems
to tend south.
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| The mighty Auglaize |
Indeed, the Auglaize does
flow south through our town, but that’s the only place that it does. It springs
to the surface near Harrod, Ohio, south of the industrial city of Lima and
north of the Indian Lake Reservoir, flows south through Wapakoneta—almost as if
it had purposely made that little detour just so that we wouldn’t be left a dry
and riverless venue with no place to reflect our lights at night or to mirror
our autumn sunsets—before describing a sharp bend and heading due north, over a
hundred miles to its confluence with the Maumee, which carries its contribution
of water and silt into Great Lake Erie. And it was precisely at that confluence
that General “Mad Anthony” Wayne built Fort Defiance in 1794 (where the
modern-day town of Defiance, Ohio, still stands), as a last defence against a
Native American confederation in the Northwest Indian War, which ended in the
nearby Battle of Fallen Timbers that same year.
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Map by Karl Musser
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maumeerivermap.png
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The name of the fort near
the mouth of the Auglaize was to prove prescient. It was derived from a statement by Charles
Scott, the leader of a detachment of Kentucky militiamen supporting General
Wayne in the region, who said, “I defy the English, Indians, and all the devils
of hell to take it.” The fortress would prove important not only in the
Northwest Indian War, but also in defeating the Native confederation that, in
the early years of the nineteenth century, first fought U.S. troops and militia
in Tecumseh’s War and then joined forces with the British against former
colonists in the War of 1812 (in the course of which Chief Tecumseh was to be
mortally wounded, the aboriginal confederation crushed and disbanded and the
British defeated forever in their lost American colonies).
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Fort Defiance,as depicted by Hermann Wiebe
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For me, however, as a
pre-school child, the Auglaize was simply what I pictured in my mind when I
heard the word “river”. Specifically, when I was very small, what that word
brought to mind was the Blackhoof Street Bridge that we crossed from our home
on the north side of town to get to “downtown”, as well as the view from the
municipal parking lot “behind town”, where my mother would park by the flood
wall, facing the river, and leave me in the car, telling me to “be good and
stay in the car”, while she ran some errands. She always promised to “be right
back”, but time is relative and to my four or five-year-old mind it would have
seemed like forever, had I not been fascinated by the river as it flowed south
then west past the back of town and under the bridge. I would stand or kneel on
the front seat of our ’49 Ford and watch it, observing the flow, the birds, the
backs of the houses and the sway of the weeping willows on the other side, and
the time seemed to go a lot faster.
But the Auglaize didn’t
really capture my heart and my imagination until we moved to the west side of
town the year I turned nine. That was the year,in the huge, hundred-year-old
house to which we moved on West Auglaize Street, that, on the urging of my
older and highly literate sister, Darla, I started slowly but surely making my
way through Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and then through The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Tom was “a winner”, a wiseguy, a trickster and
con artist, and although I envied him his forward extroverted personality, his
rougish character and his ability to pull off one scam after another, he wasn’t
the kind of boy I could really identify with. Huck, however, was something else
again. Anything Huck did was out of a sense of curiosity, desperation,
self-preservation or pure adventure. He seemed right up my alley and I
immediately became a fan. He had the great Mississippi and its tributaries as
his path to destiny. So I too needed a river, and small though it was, the
Auglaize was elected.
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| Our house on the south side of West Auglaize Street |
At first, my relationship
with it was timid. But the itch was there. We lived on the south side of West
Auglaize Street and when I looked across the street at the rambling old houses
on the north side, I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of envy, because I knew
that their backyards stretched down to the tree-lined south bank of the river.
Some of them, like the spinster sisters who lived with their aging father
directly across from our house, had large gardens that thrived in the dark
bottom-land soil, and if I craned my neck a little, I could sometimes catch a
glimpse of one of the sun-bonnetted, long-aproned sisters out there hoeing up
weeds or picking tomatoes, sweetcorn and beans.
Still, I now didn’t have
far to go to enjoy the river myself. A long block east to the corner and
another long block north and I was at the Hamilton Street Bridge that spanned
the river and its flood dam. There, I could slither down the bank to the
river’s edge and watch, when the water was high enough, how it brimmed over the
dam and foamed under the bridge.
As I say, I started out
shyly that first summer, on my way to the city pool, which was just across the
bridge. At first, I’d just slip down and watch the water a while, sitting on
the bank on the civilized upper side of the dam, where it still crested the
spillway until a few weeks of summer drought stopped the flow and where
people’s large, manicured backyards blended with the river’s edge. Then later,
I started visiting the lower side of the dam, where a gallery of scrub and
hardwood forest followed the gently curving Auglaize behind the much broader
backyards west of Hamilton Road, many of which had long supported big gardens
and truck patches behind homes that had witnessed the turn of the century and
some a goodly part of the nineteenth century before it.
That gallery of trees and
undergrowth broadened out a little further along and became a full-fledged
woods, which I wouldn’t venture to know until later on. For now I mainly just
skipped stones on the surface or heaved them into the deeper pools in the middle
to hear them plunk, while thinking of scenes from Twain’s adventure stories and
vicariously wishing I could at least become a lesser Huck Finn on this lesser
river. I got to know the calm of the river in summer, the fiery scarlets and
yellows of the folliage that reflected in its surface like sacred stained glass
in the fall, its hard-frozen marble green surface in the winter and its
terrifying white-water rage during the spring flood season. But it wasn’t until
three years had passed—and my father decided that it was, again, time to
move—that I really made the Auglaize mine.
That was the year (the
year at the end of which I would turn twelve) that we moved out of the rambling
old house on Auglaize Street—that both my mother and I loved—almost literally, straight
across the river to a brand new, characterless house like four others to either
side of it, which would be my parents’ home until they both passed away four
decades later.
To be continued...
