A River Runs Through
It
Address to the Annual Meeting
Cahaba River Society
Birmingham, AL
February 2, 2012
Michael E. Fleenor, MD, MPH
Introduction
One
of my earliest memories of the Cahaba River Society was when Betsy, my wife,
was working with Beth, Randy and Trisha on one of the first Cahaba River Fests
at the Zamora Temple. When the auction was over, I walked out with
a piece of artwork.
It
is a quite striking blend of various colors of glass including, white, clear,
green, brown and light violet. Diagonally transsecting that mélange of
primarily earth tones is a stripe of blue. A closer look will show
that this mosaic is mottled, broken glass which was gathered up from shattered
places sometime before and carefully put back together. As with all
stained glass, when the light shining through it is just right, it actually
glows. Perhaps this piece of art is on my mind more because it hangs from
the window over the kitchen sink through which I gaze while washing dishes,
something I somehow am doing more now that I’m retired!
The
River: Flow as Community
I
was attracted to this piece of art because one of my favorite short books is
A River Runs through It by Norman Maclean. Most of us here, no doubt,
have read this work years ago, and maybe some like me come back to it again and
again. It is a biographical account of the intertwining relationships
between 2 brothers, their Presbyterian minister father and the women in their
lives. The setting is in Montana, centered along the Big Blackfoot River
near Bozeman. At the heart of it, it is a parable about coming of
age: coming to terms with youthful interests and pre-occupations which
gradually or abruptly emerge into adult maturity.
Successfully
emerging from adolescence is as much about how we make those big
decisions as it is about the decisions themselves. Although I don’t have
anyone specifically in mind in this audience, it is unfortunate some of us
never move out of adolescence despite chronologically being adults and if I’m
absolutely truthful myself, there are behaviors that still are stuck in that
stage of my life, which to me is a personal case in point, that the patterns
that shape our lives are largely formed by the time we reach late
adolescence. So, short of some life-changing, enlarging experience, how
we deal with adolescence sets the variations of the theme for the legato or
staccato notes of the music our lives will be blended into the harmonies or
cacophonies of sounds around us.
I
cannot help but think too that this story could also be a parable about our
struggle toward maturity as a local community. . . And like all who go through
adolescence, it begs for similar community reflection. . .
about values and principles that last for not only our more temporal
lifetimes but for generations to come. The mark of transition into
adulthood from adolescence for individuals and communities, I believe, is
moving away from a sense of urgency, anxiety and even fear that leads to
folly; the need for self-satisfaction which, not infrequently, is at the
expense of another; the need to quell the overwhelming compulsion to make good
impressions rather than dealing with deeper matters about whom we really
are; the struggle to put the pieces of our life and the pieces of the
world into a cohesive mosaic that gives some sense of order out of sometimes
overwhelming brokenness and chaos.
Pausing
to deal with some of these more lasting issues is the importance of annual
events like the one tonight. They are opportunities to celebrate not only
the successes but the challenges of the previous year and years, since just as
a river in both infinitely changeable it is also changeless, changeless in
those matters that are most important.
It
is a time for recounting our journey around uncharted oxbows that cause us to
question if any progress has been made at all toward the attatainment of our
mission in life . . . or maybe even the mission itself is questioned, yet
surprises us when we round the bend and see clearly ahead again.
It
draws us through languid pools that pull us into the river itself so that both
river and we are indistinguishable.
Sometimes
more than we’d like, sucks us through strainers that are so harrowing as to
threaten life and limb.
And
it pushes us past islands in its path that if they are revisited over and over
again, may be submerged or prominent depending on the ebb and flow of the river
that holds them.
Rivers
carry us all along their course. But rivers also create boundaries
between islands and shoreline that need to be bridged. As such, the story
that rivers whisper are narratives about what makes us community.
How
can we bridge these “islands in the stream” (as Hemingway might call them)?
(1)
Recognize the boundaries that divide us and why they emerged. Sometimes
these boundaries are scoured by run-off and other times they are dry as sand
and gravel and no longer relevant. In any event, this requires looking at
the present through the lens of history and contrasting that with the
aspirations and/ambition of our vision of the future.
(2)
Turn over rocks in the river to expose and discuss “first principles”.
What I mean by this is to recognize and explicitly state what is most important
to each “side of the river”. Often there are hidden agendas that are
driven by respective postures of each “side of the river”. These
differences can be healthy if confronted in open dialogue but when that is
neglected they are frequently destructive and some can be catastrophic.
The Cahaba River is the river that runs through most of what we continue to see
that divides us in Jefferson County between economic and environmental sides of
the river.
(3)
Determine the source of the river. In other words, root causes.
This is closely related to the “boundaries that divide us” issue but requires a
new paradigm than what we’ve tended to use in the past.
Most
of the provincial non-holistic models of the past have generated more heat than
light, I’m afraid, so I suggest a physico-sociological model for community
health. It is a rather simple model that could be applied to communities
like our own that frequently become hamstrung on putting ideas to work because
of the putative complexity of issues. This model has 4 simple components
for a health community:
a.
Socio-economics – good jobs and good incomes
b.
Education – schooling that provides a future
c.
Sound individual life choices – personal choices that keep our neighbors in
mind.
These
three are the islands in the stream of the larger flow of
d.
Environmental health, which is both the physical (air we breathe and water we
drink) and socio-cultural environment (our cultural heritage and the way we
think as groups) which surround and often saturate the 3 other islands.
And
just as Maclean relates to maturation of himself and his brother in his novel
(and this process is not a painless one), our community challenge today, as it
has for the last 3 decades is to connect the islands of SES, education and
sound healthy individual life choices and to build bridges across those rivers
that divide us. In Mclean’s parable, the unifying activity, fly-flshing,
required that all parties wade into the water together. Despite the
differences on both sides of the shore, that is where true community is found.
Since
its inception, CRS has been dedicated to stewardship of the environment, and
most specifically of the Cahaba River, which I believe is an emblematic vision
of what is best for all of us. My hope for CRS is that it will continue
to be both ever constant and ever changing just as is the river that is its
namesake. And as the Cahaba River sustains life and health and promotes a
wide range of diversity in thought and opinion that is critical for a healthy
community, my hope is the CRS will have the same end in view.
Conclusion
Whatever
our direct relationship to rivers, they are a symbol of the flow of
relationships in our community and how we deal with decisions involving
upstream determinants of what we decide to be what is best and right and the
downstream consequences of those values, for in the flow of those rivers in
time, those decisions based on those values will take us all to the same place.
So,
what IS important to leave behind?
While
sitting with his father watching his younger brother fish on the bank of the
Big Blackfoot River McLean listened. “As always, [it] was making sounds
to itself and now it made sounds to us.” He admits even now, “I am
haunted by waters.”
As
light filtered through the trees casts its lengthening shadows to nestle the
river in its arms, if we but listen to each other and to the river, the river
too will make sounds to us. It is whispering its answers.
We
all should be “haunted by waters”.
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