In the few days he had between meeting his deadlines and leaving for a month at a remote fire lookout in the North Cascades National Park, naturalist, author and poet Tim McNulty took the time to answer some questions that I had posed to him about his career. In addition, he also graciously gave me permission to reprint a poem and an essay for Writing It Real subscribers.

This week, please enjoy “The Music of Running Water,” which is the introduction to Washington’s Wild Rivers:  The Unfinished Work (from The Mountaineers, Seattle, 1990), and the poem, “As a Heron Unsettles a Shallow Pool” from Tim McNulty’s collection entitled In Blue Mountain Dusk (1992 from Broken Moon Press, Seattle, distributed by Pleasure Boat Studio).

Next week, you’ll read his email conversation with me, and we will consider his view on writing from observations of the natural world, which, of course, includes the human world.

In the meantime, you will notice the influence of a special river in Tim McNulty’s prose and in his poem.  I hope these two pieces are but a beginning for you in finding and enjoying this author’s gracious words.

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The Music of Running Water

I knew a story had begun, perhaps long ago
near the sound of water.—Norman MacLean

Even as the first light stirs among the trees, the sound has already come to us. It has drifted up through the alders and across the small field behind the house, slipped beneath the cedar limbs and found us. A window above the bed has been left open, as much for the river as for the smaller slipstream of air, and our day is once more coaxed to life with that oldest and most pervasive of the earth’s music.

For nearly a decade the voice of the river has roused my wife and me slowly out of our separate dreams, just as its quiet murmur sent us drifting off hours before. I like to think that if there is an order and unity to the flow of our days, then the river is surely a part of that. And if a poetry graces our life together, then its voice is the undulating music of running water.

It’s true that on spring mornings the bird songs tend to dominate the upper registers, and we love them for it, but even then the snowmelt current of the river provides a deep and steady undertone. And while winter rains occasionally overwhelm the river by sheer dint of force (enhanced by the acoustics of a shake roof), an equal upsurge in the river’s voice is never too far behind. In the aural sphere, the river’s only real rival is the November wind. Rolling in ahead of the big Pacific fronts, fall winds sweep through the valleys and scour the foothills, scattering the last of the maple leaves and pruning the limbs of firs and alders with sharp lightninglike cracks. These are the winds that wake us in the middle of the night, and we know that before dawn will come the first noisy bursts of rain.

 The summer creek children waded across with their pants rolled to the knee will become a river again, with a voice utterly changed from its melodic summer pitch. Now its song will call home the salmon, pooled below in the saltwater bay. And as always I’ll go down to the river to watch for them, for in the downstream flow of things, the salmon make the circle complete.

Ocean cloud to mountain, river to sea, the hydrologic cycle though readily explained by meteorology and thermal physics — is still one of the great mysteries of the natural world. We are drawn to the sound of running water as the voiceless music of that mystery, the secret the river has brought to devout listeners since the world was new.

The first people who came to our Northwest coast, ancestors of the Salish-speaking tribes who greeted European explorers, followed the music of the river down the long canyons of the Fraser. They arrived from the ice-free corridors of the interior just as the glaciers were drawing back. A nomadic people, hunters of mammoth and bison, they had not yet learned the ways of the coastal and riverine cultures that would succeed them. But even then, something in the river must have called, bringing them to this raw coast where later hunting-gathering societies would reach the apex of their cultural development in North America.

The rivers that brought the gifts of salmon and cedar, beaver and the beautiful elk, stilt follow their courses down from the snow mountains to the tidelands and estuaries. Villages have been transformed into cities, and a newer people have derived great wealth from the land. The voice of the river speaks not as loudly anymore, and our ears are often turned elsewhere. But the river has not forgotten us; its music remains for all who have need of it, and in its promise lies our hope for the future.

As Sealth, chief of the Suquamish, told us more than a century ago, “If we sell you our land, you must remember, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers, and yours, and you must henceforth give to the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.”

For Mary and me, the river has been an active voice in our life together. When we were married, we hiked in to a favorite river deep in the mountains for our wedding ceremony. Now, years later, our daughter is encountering her world within the rippling cadences of the river’s voice.

For Caitlin it will be a world of herons and salmon and trees, of owl hoots through the starry darkness and deer wandering past on their ancient rounds.

Our prayer for her is that this lithe and delicate music will continue throughout her lifetime, a constant touchstone wherever she goes. And that the unhampered flow of the singing river will be there for her child to listen to, when the world has come to fully appreciate the great mystery its song has to teach us.

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As a Heron Unsettles a Shallow Pool
For Mary

At times
when the too-many threads
of our speech become knots,
and words
fall back on us unsaid;

when I go brooding across wet fields
to the river, and you
in the kitchen alone.

When the earth itself is burdened,
as if the sky
or the weight of the sky
were suddenly too much for her—
the rain-drenched maples bent low
and crossed,
words too quickly cast.

A stillness
heavy as snow.

Then, as a heron unsettles a shallow pool,
as it lifts blue wings
and leaps
slowly into the downstream wind,

the weight of love finds its own wings,
unfolded as slowly, one
to each.

And as a pale band of sky opens
at dusk,
so the heart will open.
The smoothly rippled flow
–river of our days—
unsettling
in a litany of light.