The River Runs North

So the Youghiogheny runs north? my friend interjected into the conversation. She had to, to get a word in edgewise. We all had a lot to say as we were driving through the mountain pass, skirting the arbitrary line that separates Virginia and Maryland from Southern Pennsylvania. The mountains don’t respect the division – they don’t care about the titles of commonwealths. They don’t know why their own changes from Appalachia to Allegheny, from Cumberland to Kanawaha.

I guess it must, my mother replied. My father nodded in agreement. They clearly hadn’t given it much thought. This is what it is to be of a place, to know a riverrun like a vein on the back of your hand. My parents’ existence is not by map, but by instinct. When I am with them, I lament that I will never know anywhere the way that they know this corner of Pennsylvania.

Californians joke that there are no mountains back East, only hills. Because what’s 2,600 feet compared to 16,000? But they forget that the elevation of these mountains was birthed by collision and worn by time. These mountains are as old as earth in its present configuration. They span not only from Alabama to Maine, but from Europe to North Africa. The only line they observe is the breaking of the continents – the moment they moved to both sides of the Atlantic.

And yet now, they seem fixed. They are locked in place and suspended in time. They are suspicious of the outside. When I was visiting few years ago, someone said You don’t count as being from here anymore. They may be right – I’ve been gone far longer than I called this region home. And yet, when I am back, it feels as if this place flows from me. When I wander among the tress, it absorbs my entire being. The thickness of the humidity covers me like a blanket and threatens to sing me to sleep.

I tell my friend the stories of this place that I heard from my father. I do not have answers to her specific questions – I only have tales of mountains and rivers. I only have the separation of a continental divide. I only have a longing in the most ancient ventricle of my heart. As I age, a vein grows more prominent on the back of my left hand. I think it runs north.