Upstream and Downstream

From In the Sea of Life Enisled - An introduction to the teaching of Geography in Waldorf education, Antropos 1998

by David L. Brierley

As a ten year old I knew that water flows over the masses of land. Water and mountains decide the anatomy of a continent ... where from? where to? When I stood on the banks of my stream my thoughts went to its estuary and even more towards its source, towards the highlands from whence it came, to where it had its origin. The human imagination has always been captivated by the flow of the river. From earliest times the source of the river has been somewhat of a mystery which earlier was expressed through mythology. For a period of two thousand years we tried to find a solution to the mystical fact that the Nile came out of the desert bringing with it each year a gift upon which a whole civilization was dependent. Numerous expeditions followed Herodotus' footprints, southwards into impenetrable swamps and jungles. For many hundreds of years the source of the Nile remained in the imagination of mankind. Is there a place for the imagination in the Geography lesson?

Recently an expedition thought they had found the source of the greatest of all rivers - the Amazon, a point 5500 m. high in the snow-capped Peruvian mountains, only one hundred and sixty kilometres from the Pacific Ocean.

Walking up and down my stream gave me two different experiences. The hill gives motion to water. Every stream and river, even the mighty Ganges and Amazon, owe their play and purity to the elevation of the land. The rain that falls on the surface of the earth finds no immediate resting place. Paths are prepared for the raindrops, their destiny is to descend, sometimes slow and sometimes swift, but hardly pausing. They glide over their daily portion of the earth as on a kind of pilgrimage in the cause of mankind. Far away the great heart of the ocean is calling for each drop. Deep calleth unto deep. I don't know which is the most beautiful: the calm invisible slope or the passage cloven through the hill.

A first thought is that the river cuts its way down its course. Not so, the river finds its way. Rivers don't really cut away, they can just as easily choke up. Water will always endeavour to find a way and will be on its way in no time at all but it takes centuries to gorge out an opening.

High up in the hills where the river has its source, we can find its headwaters. This is the head of the river. It is often a colder region than normal, just like the head is the coolest part of the human anatomy. It is also the hardest part. These upper parts are characterized by plunges rather than flow and the course is in straight, angular zig-zags. In its wild plunges it draws to it considerable air making bubbles and a mass of white foam. It is unnavigable, wild and romantic. I call these upper reaches brawling brooks because you hear the water before you see it. It is the audible part of the river.

In the next phase we talk of portages. This involves the idea of carrying. The river emerges from the mountain region where it is full of wild turbulence and the descent is modified. No longer is there a dashing, wayward course. Now there is a river bed, a hollow which bears the river and often it varies in width. I read once that the Mississippi at Natchez has been measured to be a mile wide but at high tide nearly thirty miles wide. The channel is a part of the river bed which gives life and motion to the water. The channel can move from one side of the bed to the other. For me this is the rhythmical heartland of the river - its middle course. Later on, the windings check the current. The river gives rise the islands which my paper boats had to negotiate, here the river was truly navigable. Lakes pour themselves into one another just like in the middle courses of the Indus and Euphrates. The river is no longer white but often a greenish-brown. It is quieter but is there for all the world to see.

At last we come to the lower part of this vein of water. Unfortunately my stream disappeared into a sewer and under the road. But I knew that the incline would be slight because the river was to meet the sea which is the most horizontal expanse on the planet. This part of the river gives rise to a great conflict of forces all trying to come into equilibrium. Just like us humans a river divides itself when it pours out into the wide world. As a boy I used the expression 'fingers' and not 'mouths'. Mouths are something you put food in. Here it's a question of going out into the ocean. I saw from my little atlas that all the greatest rivers had their fingers - the Nile, the Ganges, the Mississippi and of course, the Brahmaputra which has a hand the size of the whole of England. I could count fourteen such deltas in different parts of the world.

The Amazon plunges into the Atlantic four thousand miles away from its source. It pours one-fifth of all the river-water on earth into the ocean driving the salt water back a hundred miles or so. Its mouth is two hundred miles wide. The Amazon is much more than a river: it's a global lifeline.

Now, by the fireside I gazed into the flames and rested my weary limbs. My stream was a part of me and as such it was of worldwide importance. I knew that no two stretches of running water are alike. Each river has its own individuality - its tone, smell and pattern of movement; that individuality never allows itself to be expressed in simple formula. I had become acquainted with the Thames. As a twelve year old I begged to sit for hours on its banks, chewing each morsel of my sandwich to draw out the time. The Thames is not one of the largest rivers in Europe, in a worldwide perspective merely a stream. But then not only the length determines the importance of rivers, the Thames is small but vastly important. This was also the case with my own local river.

I was back again in that familiar room to find adventure waiting for me beside the stove. The most beautiful adventures are not those we seek.

By the fireside I had found a motive and the motive was myself. I was on a journey towards somewhere undefined. I had learnt that in my English backwater it was possible both to see and to look around. "I see!" said the neighbours in their broad accents when they meant that they understood. Everything was temporary and always in fluxion.

No books, no photographs, movement was my day as a nine year old. It was then it was determined that my life would be Geography and Education.

We have a tendency to forget the most obvious and vital. If I ask myself what I learnt at school, it was never that which I would now call essential in the true sense of the word. Usually school was a world of scientific abstractions. My stream saved me. I never heard at school that water is the most manifold and most vital element in nature - the source of life. I heard little of its yielding qualities and of its flexibility. At school, water was a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, H2O.

My stream had told me it was much more. I was living in a qualitative world but was quickly becoming an offer for a quantitative approach. A natural experience will always be directed towards the qualitative; the word quality is something which has an immediate identity. My stream was intelligible, illustrative and full of meaning.

It was a Geography lesson in miniature. To me, as a child, these streams always brought to mind the beginning of the world, the world before human progress, the time before the settlement. And in this Geography in miniature was set a much vaster Geography. There were surely great rivers of hundreds of miles broad, flowing in an era remote. In the vast Geography created by the miniature landscape and the fantasy of the interested child nurtures a vision of the world independent of time and space. The child's connection to the subject is genuine, rooted and fitting. It is a question of man fitting the landscape. The child is placed in his own setting, in tune with his landscape. In a time of upheaval and change this childhood world is unchanging in that I am present.

Deep in the human soul lies the spirit of adventure as a driving force. Curiosity is a most important platform for education. The greatest aim of all education worth its salt is the fostering of will-power. The ultimate goal must be self-education.

In my youth I found out that the deepest rivers flow with the least noise. I started to read river stories, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, Joseph Conrad's A Heart Of Darkness ...

My imagination was to be fired in a new way, by word and no longer movement.

Conrad's appeal to me was a mesmeric sense of place. He could make a seemingly featureless stretch of ocean imprint itself upon the reader's memory. Unforgettable is his description of the voyage of the 'Patna' in Lord Jim. He could create places too, as the republic of Costaquana in Nostromo.

But it was his rivers that made the greatest impression on me. Conrad himself visited the Congo in 1890, just like Marlow does in his The Heart of Darkness.(1902).

Going up the river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an inpenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of the sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side.

The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands, you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself cut off forever from everything known once - somewhere far away - in another existence perhaps. There were movements when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not had a moment to spare to yourself; but it came back in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.1

I could read it over and over again. What did Conrad mean? Why on earth had we never heard about Conrad and his Congo at school? Was it because he started his sentences with conjunctions - something that was strictly forbidden at our school?

How wonderful it was to realise that others loved rivers, that it was a deep-down universal necessity. I sat down and cried. My father had told me they were to build houses over my stream. But there were other places ... and people with the same experiences as myself ...

I was born in a country of brooks and rivers, in a corner of Champagne, called le Vallage due to the great number of its valleys. The most beautiful of its places was for me the hollow of a valley by the side of fresh water, in the shade of willows ... My pleasure is still to follow the steam, to walk along its banks in the right direction, in the direction of the flowing water that leads life towards the next village ...

But our native country is less an expanse of territory than a substance; it's a rock or a soil or an aridity or a water or a light. It's the place where our dreams materialize, it's through that place that our dreams take their proper form. Dreaming beside the river, I gave my imagination to the water, the green, clear water that makes the meadows green. I can't sit beside a brook without falling into a deep reverie, without seeing once again my happiness. The stream doesn't have to be ours. The anonymous water knows all my secrets. And the same memory issues from every spring.
Gaston Bachelard 2

The river is the artery of life and as such is essential in the teaching of Geography. It is a starting point and an end in a circular path of discovery which we can call the Geography curriculum. When the Ancient Greeks skirted the coast of the Occident and finally came to the coast of North Africa, they found a natural phenomenon which was so overwhelming that they settled there and made the area a centre of natural studies. They called the river aigyptos which can be translated to 'connection' or 'flow'. Today, the whole region around the Nile is called 'Egypt', the country of flow and connection.

In the Waldorf/Steiner school we introduce the study of the home area by visiting a river. Here we introduce the world of Geography to nine year olds as we follow its course from the mouth of the river to its source, that is to say against the natural current. The children are thus made aware of the living element in their own neighbourhood by moving along the banks of a watery line which is the essential basis of our earthly existence. It is the basis of both conservation and development.

Later, as youths, the children discover that all the capitals in the world are situated on a river with the exception of one. Mexico City is today renowned for having the worst water problem in the world. Not only are supplies of drinking water at a minimum, but the inability to wash away sewage has led to a major pollution crisis.

Notes

1) Conrad, Joseph: The Heart Of Darkness, Penguin, London 1995.
2) Bachelard, Gaston: L’Eau et les Rêves. Essai sur l’imagination de la Matière.