...of Time and the River

One of my favorite bicycle rides takes me west along the northern edge of the San Diego River from the middle of Mission Valley all the way out to the ocean, over a bridge at Ocean Beach, down to Dog Beach, and then back along the south side of the river to Mission Valley. Now is that time of year when we get the biggest and most varied congregation of water fowl on the river. Today they were all there: cormorants, snowy egrets, mallards, mud hens, sand pipers, and a dozen other varieties of water birds. I’m guessing that many of them, like the tourists that flock to San Diego, are here for only a short while.

For some reason I can’t explain, today the river made me think of Thomas Wolfe’s Of 
Time and the River. I’ve always been intrigued by the subtitle of that book: “A Legend of Man’s Hunger in His Youth.” What does it do to the ideal of the book to change “youth” to “old age.” The birds have been settling on the river at this time of year for aeons before I was born, and they will be stopping on their way south forever after I am gone. Thomas Wolfe died at age thirty-eight, so he never had the experience of old age. I wonder what he might have said about it if he had.