White Magic by Elissa Washuta

White Magic by Elissa Washuta

Author:Elissa Washuta [Washuta, Elissa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781951142391
Google: iMqWzQEACAAJ
Amazon: 195114239X
Publisher: Tin House Books
Published: 2021-04-26T23:00:00+00:00


My second week, I saw my first superyacht, the two-hundred-foot Lady Lola. While the big boat passed under my bridge, I learned from Google about its remote-control curtains, Technogym exercise equipment, two Jet Skis, six sets of dive gear, heated pool with waterfall, eighteen-hole golf course with floating buoys that allow passengers to use the sea as though it’s the green, outdoor theater, and helipad space. The closed-off upper deck has an office, hot tub, salon, and sheltered terrace. A summer charter went for $430,000 a week. The boat was for sale for $49.9 million.

I had no way of understanding such a boat. My dad’s seemed huge when he was shoving it into the water from the lakeshore, but it was just a fishing boat propelled by an electric motor smaller than a toaster oven. I drove the boat down the Delaware River once, when I was about ten. I’d crossed that river countless times on our trips to Pennsylvania to visit my grandparents or the big mall. The water drew the line between home and that country of steel and coal. To be in the line was to be in no-place, to wedge my body into a divide.

My mom grew up near the banks of the Columbia, the largest river in the Pacific Northwest. Its drainage basin encompasses most of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, as well as portions of several other states and part of British Columbia. At its mouth is a little point of land called Cape Disappointment: a British fur trader went looking for a massive river he’d heard about, but he found only what he thought was a bay, so he decided the river wasn’t real.

For thousands of years, this river was a community core, transportation link, food source, and world center. The river didn’t divide; it unified disparate villages. Over the last century, settlers have dammed it to curb flooding, ease passage, make land, and generate a staggering amount of power for the region.

From land or water, a river is slightly visible, mostly obscured. A canal wants to be a river. It wants to carry what a river carries, but without flair: tidy banks, no tricky bends. A river doesn’t want to be a canal, but now that the settlers are here, a river doesn’t have a choice.

My elementary school class took an educational boat ride down the Morris Canal, constructed in the 1820s and ’30s to bring Pennsylvania anthracite from the Delaware River through North Jersey and to New York City. People had cut down the trees and needed something else to burn. The canal starts in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, where I went to Catholic grade school; goes through Hackettstown, where I attended high school; continues through Sussex County, where, at the restored canal town of Waterloo Village, I went to poetry festivals as a teenager; and passes through four counties before ending in Jersey City, where my parents would take Nate and me to the science museum. From the museum’s cafeteria, I took photos of the tiny-but-not-so-distant-now New York City skyline.



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