The Sacramento River

Everywhere I’ve ever lived I’ve sought out one particular thing among others. Whether it was Riverside, California, Ukraine, Mission Viejo, New Orleans, or Sacramento, always this one particular thing.

Always it is a quiet place in nature. A quiet place where I can be alone. I had many spots in Riverside. Most were established in childhood, some in adulthood, and all were some place quiet and far removed, often somewhere with some altitude, a sort of perch overlooking the din of the city. In Ukraine it was the forests and the banks of the river Protoka that cut through my small village or the great parks of Kyiv. In Mission Viejo, it was the empty early morning beach at Salt Creek or the Oso Creek trail that wound up through sunny green lawns and empty driveways. In New Orleans, I would amble around the busy and enticing streets of Uptown or the Irish Channel, Audobon Park, or The Fly overlooking the Mississippi River. I had a few remote spots to bark at the moon in City Park, with its ragged edges and droning cicadas. Sacramento is no different. Since moving to the Pocket, I quickly located a new spot—the walking path along the levee of the Sacramento River.

The levee has been a sanctuary for me. I often ride my bike up through Garcia Bend Park in the Pocket and head north towards the pump station. There’s a stretch where the pavement gives way to gravel and there is a stand of old pines that keep watch over a placid section of the river. Placid if you catch it towards dusk. I love to park my bike and take a seat on the warm gravel, if its summer, and ponder this and that. I have certainly contemplated some tough things on that tranquil spot over the years. Sometimes I listen to some droning type of electronic music and lower the volume so as to include the ambient noise of the levee—the buzz of insects and rustling of the pines or other trees. I often find myself listening to the Vangelis track “Twilight.” The odd passerby is infrequent at most, so one is able to step into that old welcome solitude. I have seen red-tailed hawks, as big as cats, perched patiently in the dry grass beside the levee. I have also seen Western Bluebirds, American Robins and plentiful Scrub Jays frolicking along the banks.

The river also offers a waft of life on some of the rivers I’ve come to know in my travels. Blue wood smoke encircling fishermen angling for their last catch of the day. There is something about the smell of wood smoke that brings me right back to my village in Ukraine: leaf piles burning in autumn, the haze settling over the chilly late afternoon golden light. Shashlik fires abandoned and smoldering along the deserted banks of the Protoka after a day of fishing. Or the flittering orange glow in the pitch black night of cooking fires in a village along the Senegal River and on a beach on the Black Sea. Smoke follows people, hovers above the rustling and chatter of their living. The smell of wood smoke sends my mind caroming from images of camping and travel to places where living is more visible, where it rubs against you and stains your skin and soaks into the fabric of your clothes.

And the river, as with any great body of water, offers me a sense of peace, an antidote to the confusion of modern life, as it offers itself as an edge to place oneself, a limit-line, so that when one steps to the edge, everything behind him, his worries, have an end, even if he can see across to the other side. There is a moment of safety and of tranquility at that edge; and when its time to hop on the bike and head home, there is a sense that everything is going to be okay. Nothing extends indefinitely, yet the water keeps flowing, as it has and will forever. The river always reminds me of that, and I always think of these things when I watch my son who is named River.