Introduction

An artist is sitting on the bank of a river, drawing in a sketch book. He's perched on a shooting stick; its tip, half-buried in the gravel, is only a few inches from the edge of the gently rippling water. Beside him on the ground lies a battered tin box, open, holding pencils, a pencil sharpener, an eraser.

The artist is Gerard Brender à Brandis; it is his wood engravings which you'll see in this book. I'm a few yards away, sitting on a slope where the earth is padded with dry leaves and grass and twigs. Propped against my knees is a notebook. I look, listen, reflect, write. I record details of the scene in front of us. I listen for birds. I observe how water flows and how land and water meet. I think about water, I feel the air, I watch the clouds. Here are all four of the mediæval elements: earth, air, fire (the sun), and water?of which, in that ancient but by no means irrelevant conception, everything else was composed.

The river that we're observing is the Grand, in south-western Ontario, but the story that this book tells is, by analogy, the story of many others because rivers the world over have much in common. This river valley is, in a sense, a microcosm of the biosphere and of the planet: the history of this river is that of the evolution of a landscape, of human settlement, of development and exploitation, of damage and reconstruction. A similar story can be told of many parts of the planet's land surface, because that surface is a jig-saw puzzle of watersheds. Each of us lives in one. Every gutter along a city street, every culvert under a country road, every weed-filled ditch beside a farm field, every ravine and canyon, reminds us that we live in a watershed. Each watershed is three-dimensional'surface, underground, and air; it, and the environment that it holds in the palm of its hand, are created and sustained by rivers.

As well as being about the river's biography in space and time, this book is about how two artists perceive the river and have come to understand its importance to the part of the planet that it flows through. In images and words we reflect on "riverness", the private life of rivers, the dialogue between land and water, the connections with vegetation and climate and weather, with humans and their works.

The story of the river and the watershed is a human story, a very Canadian one about First Peoples, exploration and immigration, immigrants and what they brought and created here.

This river?here?is everywhere.

(Continued in The Grand River...)