River Portraits > The First Day of Summer, 2003

By Barbara Kirchheimer

When I describe the Thames as "picturesque" in my 1936 Journal I had probably never heard of the Charles River. Now, on the first day of summer, I am standing on my ninth floor balcony looking down at this most enchanting river. In front of my building it makes a graceful double curve, rippled by the wind or the tide as it flows to Boston harbor and into the Atlantic Ocean.

The trees along the banks are especially lush and green after the soggy spring and above the trees there is so much sky that my daughter said, "You can tell the earth is round from here." No one could tire of watching what is, literally, the passing scene. Most of the year, with little regard for the weather rowing crews (sometimes eight, sometimes four) slide by, rowing hard and then stopping to listen to the coach who motors alongside in a flat catamaran-like boat. If I am awake in the early morning I hear him, but I can never make out what he says. Rowboats coma and go, and canoes, and kayaks, and pleasure boats, and sometimes the big summer tour boats with their striped awnings to keep off the sun or the rain. The passengers always wave to the strollers and the skate boarders along the bank, but sometimes a child will look up, and I wave.

The ducks and geese in great numbers, have a busy life on the river, cleverly avoiding the human activity. Of course the newborns have to stay close to the bank. A few weeks ago I saw twelve tiny goslings in a perfect row, mother and father like parentheses keeping them in line. And just yesterday they swam by again, still in a line, and bigger but apparently not quite ready to be on their own.

Autumn and winter are no less absorbing from my window: falling leaves, bare branches, sometimes covered lightly with clinging snow, and ice floes turning and twisting graceful as dancers. One bright morning I looked across to the other bank and saw what appeared to be a small, very black tree trunk with a bent lower branch. I stared, confused, because I had never noticed it before. Finally, after a time, the tree and the branch moved very slowly and carefully—a man in black practicing Tai Chi.

Sometimes I name my bedroom "The Rome-Paris Room," because I can see the Colosseum-like Harvard Stadium, and the arched Seine-like bridge that spans the river just above the bend. But the Charles is not the Tiber, not the Seine, and certainly not the Thames. I think what I find so different about the Charles from those urban rivers is that it disappears completely after dark—unless a full moon shines on a cloudless night. It seems not to be there, so I wonder sometimes if it really does go away, hurrying down to the ocean and back before daybreak. Perhaps on a moonlit night I could join it, and float along until I too become part of the sea.