The River Always Wins: Water as a Metaphor for Hope and Progress

By David Marquis

A meditation on movement of both society and nature, based on the author’s experiences as an activist. In short, aphoristic chapters, Marquis explores the power of force and collectivity through the metaphor of water. As an activist, David Marquis founded the Oak Cliff Nature Preserve in Dallas, and has consulted with the Texas Conservation Alliance since 2011. He brings an unerring belief in the connective and healing power of nature to The Water Always Wins.

• Language: English
• Publisher: La Reunion Publishing
• Release date: Aug 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781646050079

Book preview

1

On a broad plain outside Taos, New Mexico, leading to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, a bridge spans a deep, narrow gorge, and at the bottom of the steep rock walls is a river, the Rio Grande.

The water roaring below, so distant as to be silent in its rushing, did not begin its long journey to the Gulf of Mexico at the bottom of the gorge.

It began on the top, on the surface, and over more years than can be known—the way the indigenous know the time to plant corn or a mother knows to stroke a child’s hair or even in the soulless counting of seconds within a digital timepiece—the water found and caressed and forced its way through rock. When the snowmelt ran plentiful, the water worked on the rock. When drought came, the water, though less, worked on the rock.

At no time did the water ever stop working on the rock. A single trickle, a single drop, constituted the whole of water itself, for its purpose and its nature are known to itself.

And what is the nature of the river?

The river is made of drops. Every river in the world—the Ganges, the Nile, the Hudson, the Amazon, the Mississippi—is made of drops. One drop is one drop is every drop.

Rivers, ancient as days, may differ in the life along their banks, their depth, or the frequency of their flooding, but one thing is true: if enough drops flow together in the same direction long enough, the river always wins.

There was a time in this country when black people were enslaved because of the color of their skin, but the river won.

There was a time when women were not allowed to vote, but the river won.

Through many centuries gay people had to live in the shadows and hide their truest selves, but the river is winning on that issue and will continue to.

If enough drops flow together in the same direction long enough, the river always wins.

2

The Drops

If you had enough people with enough eye-droppers, you could drain the oceans. One person after another stepping forward, bending down, filling their eyedropper, squeezing the contents into a bucket, passing the bucket back along an assembly line deep into the heartland where each bucket of salt water would be filtered through some kind of desalination device because, after all, you can’t drink sea water or pour it onto crops.

It would be an altogether impractical and even futile undertaking, but you could do it.

It is possible because the ocean is made of the same building material as rivers. It is made of drops, and the drops of molecules. The drops, when gathered into a torrent, can either solve or create problems. A tsunami is a problem. A stream powering a gristmill to grind grain made it possible not only to eat but to store