Water Ways

On Sunday at the home of good friends I saw a photograph of a train near Brandon, Manitoba crossing a bridge over water. I was told that this bridge was not over a river. It certainly looked like a river to me, but I learned that it was one of the sluices or floodways that help keep Winnipeg and its environs from being flooded in spring. I said that I loved the various words we have for watercourses or for places where water has flowed. I was thinking in particular of sluice with its fluidity of sound, as if you can hear the water right in the word itself, or rills, a lovely word, both noun and verb, for small stream or streaming. We can regret the loss of the word fluence, meaning stream, now listed as obsolete (even though we still like to say confluence); there is something to be said for its sound, the fluency or flow of it.

There are of course the places where water has flowed but are now dry. I immediately thought wadi but said arroyo, not quite sure if I pronounced it properly. Then I wondered about gulches, gulleys, and gorges, but it was wadis I came back to. We drove through them in Syria last month, maneuvered the car carefully down rough banks, across the stone or gravel bottoms, and up the other side to more flat desert. It was not always clear where the water had come from to form these now dry watercourses in the desert, impossible even to imagine water having been there, and especially enough water to flow through, roll boulders, and wash out the edges of roads. There are places on the way north from Palmyra where the water in the wadi cut the road away so sharply that it left a gravel bank more than a metre high, topped with the broken edge of the remaining asphalt. But there was no water and no flow when we were there.

I lived for a few months in a small cabin off the Redrooffs Road north of Sechelt many years ago. At the main house on the property there was a pond with a wooden sluice at one end. It was wonderful to walk around the pond on a still evening with cedars and Douglas firs reflected in it and to cross the small bridge over the sluice. This was British Columbia, the spring rain was abundant, and the pond was brimming over. As the water flowed across the flat boards of the sluice, its surface curved a little before it fell in a clear sheet the full width of the sluice way into a stream bed strewn with boulders and rushed down toward Sergeant’s Bay. It was the curve that always took my attention, the physicality of that water’s flow just before it fell, a place where surface tension, its sinuous pull, became something you could see and understand.

On Sunday we went with our friends' dog for a walk around Sullivan’s Pond. Some men were sailing their remote controlled yachts on the still water, and one sloop in particular, on a close reach, pushed a curving bow wave and left a perfect wake trail as it sped toward the other side of the pond. There were ducks and green grass and blooming rhododendrons, but the best thing for me was the sluice with a small bridge over it and the sensuous flow of pond water curving over its edge before it fell into the stream that fed into a culvert and took it under the downtown area and into the harbour.

I thought of Ghassan and the square tank he loaded into the bed of his ‘77 Chev pickup to haul a load of water from the oasis to Atala’s encampment to replenish their tank and wondered what either of them would think of this smooth sluice of fresh water that flowed down and away, collected by no one, all day and all night, and of the green everywhere, so full and lush, so perfect for grazing sheep and camels.