The Mullica
Photograph by John Reismiller

The Mullica is a small tidal river in southern New Jersey that flows from its meager sources upstream in the Pine Barrens, widens to respectable river size as it passes a few small villages on its banks and eventually loses itself in the waters of Swan Bay, and with this new identity ultimately merges with the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean.

I have lived by this river for nearly 40 peaceful years. I have shared the seasons with it as it has shared its seasons with me. Because of this bond, I felt that I owed it some debt of gratitude for the many consolations it has granted me and for its ever-assuring but inscrutable presence in my life. The following is a tribute that is long past due.

This morning I walked down to the Mullica River again as I have been doing these many mornings over the long years. As I walked across the park which borders a small stretch of the river, dancing spots of golden-yellow, balanced precariously atop the bending wires of green stems, nodded to the brightness of the fall sun. In a slight reprieve from the onrush of a darker season, the fall dandelion was making its brief valedictory to the woods and the field. Not the taraxacum officinalis of the early spring and summer months, but the later leontodon autumnalis that stays with us into the cold and crisp nights of early November.

Composites, one of the last evolutionary steps of the flowering world, have always caught my interest with their circles of small, lobed golden ray flowers sometimes surrounding, as in the daisies, a buttonlike center called a disk which is made up of hundreds of tiny tubular florets. It has been a testament to its superb adaptability that this family, the largest of all flowering plants in the world, has been able to perpetuate itself on such a scale. It is unique in the plant world. No single floret of a composite is duplicated by any other plant family. It is an isolate but a thriving one. It is an alien like black mustard, red and white clover, wild carrot, spearmint, peppermint, mullein, chicory, ox-eye daisy and others. Their seeds were first carried with the cargoes of ships. They landed and steadfastly chose to stay in places too inhospitable for the native flora. They survive in poor soils and arid spaces. They are tough and hearty and have an unbeatable system for propagating themselves. One of its members has even achieved treehood, the groundsel. They turn up in the most unlikely places. Bane of gardeners and suburbanites, I cheer their unpredictability and hardihood and walk toward the river.

As I pass through the open field of this small park, I approach the wooden stairway that leads down to the sandy strip of river bank. I descend its steps and stand at the river's verge, the soft autumn breezes rustling the few remaining leaves that twist on those overarching trees whose roots have found a sanctuary along its bank The river is quiet today, not like yesterday when its waters were roiled by the west winds of fall. Today it glitters peacefully in the morning sun as I stand at its edge, its wavelets gently lapping the bank and barely touching the tips of my shoes. As I walk along the narrow strip of loam, I pause at a clump of blossoming purple asters extending themselves through the gnarled and matted roots of a capsized oak whose dead trunk has been turned to a silver gray by the laving tides of the river. I move on, my feet imprinting my presence on the silted shoreline, and my thoughts, like the peaking wavelets that rush up to cover my padding steps, are washed back by the years that I have spent by its side.

My memories take me back to a younger river, a river whose tides flowed in and out past the home where my wife and I spent our early married years. We fished off a small dock at its edge on lovely warm summer afternoons, catching river bass and sunfish. Few motorized boats were around in those days to disturb the fishes' leafy haunts in the submerged aquatic plants that lay just below the shimmering surface of the water. There was elodea, northern arrowhead, pickerel weed, marestail and even clusters of wild rice along the river bank. These plants and others are the guardians of the river, protecting its bottom from the currents which stir up mud and sand, shielding its shoreline from erosion and providing its fish with livable temperatures, food and a constant supply of oxygen. But they are more than merely guardians of life along the river. They grace the river's edge with a kind of floating green beauty and remind us that even the river is nourished by the verdure of life. My memories are of an earlier and more abundant river. They fade in the brightness of the present sun.

The river has many guises. At times it is a caravan of serried sunbeams passing through the mirrored assemblage of pines, oaks and cedars who bear a double witness to its never-ending journey to and fro; sometimes it assumes the proportions of a tawny-purple water snake, its glistening girth edging up the dampness of its narrow beach and leaving its rib-ridged prints patterned in the sand when it withdraws again; at other times it is a young bride trailing a train of sequined light as she rolls on unescorted past the shore with an effortless grace, vainly seeking her parental streams again or returning to marry with the sea once more.

Rivers are like people. The mighty ones may not be as agreeable as the smaller ones. The Mullica is an agreeable river, if rivers can be said to have such a characteristic. As a small river, it revels in its sun-flecked surface and cedar tint which it borrows from the fallen members of this species along its bank. Dressed in this special hue, it dreams its way under bridges and past the islands near its mouth as it eventually is lured back to the sea each day. This push and pull of the river is,
...as much
pull as push--as the blood goes--
from the heart, then toward it
or the breath goes, or a fiddle bow.
We're at home somehow
where a balance is...*

I'm at home where a river is.

The Mullica is a tidal river with its low and high tides. Twice a month, during the first and third quarters of the moon, the neap tides occur when there is little difference between the low and high water marks. And then there are the spring tides, having nothing to do with the season, which are exceptionally low or high and are caused by the alignment of the sun and the moon with the earth. Brackish near its lower end, it mixes cedar and salt , encouraging certain fish and aquatic plants to thrive in its hospitality On rare days of high salinity, I have seen its waters play host to eels who snake upriver through its flood currents or to crabs who scuttle along its dark and murky bottom.

The river has its sounds the gentle lapping of its shore; the wrenching crepitations in winter when its warmer currents below split its frozen surface to escape their icy prison; the splashing sound it makes as high winds or a storm whip up whitecaps on its surface. These are the weather sounds of the river. They temper the river and shape its moods.

But there are other sounds the noisy quacking of the mallards as they paddle up and down in search of food and some unknown destination; the raucous honking of wild geese as they gather to make their flight north in February or honk their way back over the river again in fall; the cawing of crows as they roost in the trees along the riverside; the screeching of hawks as they circle far above, looking for prey along its edge; the mocking voice of the river itself as it returns a caller's voice from across the other bank in perfect parody.

This river has known the footprints of the otter as it creeps along its bank; the helpless flailing of fated ospreys, shot by hunters, and the times when my wife and others rushed hopelessly to its edge to save them; the quiet strides of the great blue heron as it wades on its stilt-like legs, looking for fish in the shallows; the annual return of the alewives who swim against its currents each spring to spawn at the post hole in Batso; the brilliant nuptial plumage of the male wood duck as it courts its mate along the creeks that swell its course. Its environs have been home to vole and turtle; its waters the patron of terrapin, toad and water snake; its marshes the haunt of muskrat and rice rat. It has been a prudent mother to them all.

Long before Eric Mullica, a wandering, adventuresome Swede who first built a rough log house near its banks centuries ago, the Lenape Indians had named the river. But a river has no history, no past or future. It contemplates only itself. People have remembered and recorded how the Mullica once floated privateer and freebooter; how its banks hold the bones of soldier, highwayman and settler; or how its currents have carried captains, rogues and strivers to their fate. But the river flows on, unmindful of the human dramas enacted on or near its waters. It measures time only by the great oaks that have lived or died on its shore; by the endless generations of life that have flourished in its depths and shallows; by the tons of silt that it has carried downstream to its mouth. The river itself is timeless. If you touch its water, you will feel the last of what has passed and the first of what will come. The river is the everlasting present. A mighty oak falls; the river knows no sound.

And so I gaze out upon the river, standing on its sandy shoulder this bright October morning, and think of these hallowed moments we both share. My memories of a younger river come trooping back again. I think of how my wife loved this river and how she once remarked that no matter where she went, when she saw the bridge at Greenbank she knew that she was home. The river gave us both a sense of place and belonging. Her memory will always float on its tides.

I turn away and mount the wooden steps that lead up from the bank. I climb to the top, cross the narrow road and pass through the park again, the fall dandelions still bending there in the breeze. I stoop to pick a few to take home where they can display their simple beauty in a vase on my harvest table, a colorful bit of outside brought indoors. Such a hardy race can well afford to lose some members to my avarice. I walk back a short distance along the lane, noticing the small white heads of snake root that border the dense woods and realize that fall has certainly arrived. I reach my house, pause by the woods and look back down the few hundred feet that lead to the river. I reflect on the years that the river has provided me with moments of profound peace and contemplation. Of how it has assured me of a feeling of some lingering permanence and distant purpose in a seemingly chaotic and meaningless world.

These comforts have been the gift of the river to me. I wish it well, and leave all my memories and hopes in its keep. Long after I have passed into the night, this river will still flow ceaselessly back and forth, as the blood of life flows, always with new waters to join, new suns to greet, new stars to mirror.



* From Peter Kane Default's poem Equinoctial
First published in ThunderSandwich # 15, September, 2001