The relationships between river and dams is a curious one. Dams reveal what was once hidden by water and submerge what was once out in the air. This week I canoed around a heavily dam-controlled region of the Susquehanna River. The dams smoothed out the rapids for easy paddling, but cut off indigenous fish from their spawning grounds. They washed from human eyes ancient Native American rock art, but unveiled truly extraordinary rock formations along the banks. Vaulting walls of schist slope and twist in formations etched by centuries of water and erosion. It makes our intrusion that tiny bit more forgivable, that we can still appreciate one aspect of the changed landscape. At its widest the Susquehanna felt more like a large lake, paddles scooping deep and getting little purchase in the driving wind. My reading this week brought me to other lakes…

After reading Mary Oliver’s “The Ponds,” I was compelled to look back at the poem I passed a few pages earlier, “The Lilies Break Open Over the Dark Water.” Both prominently feature Oliver’s thoughts on water lilies, a peculiar family of pond plant. What immediately struck me was the recurring description of the “darkness” of the water the lilies grow in. The black midsummer ponds, dark water from which the plants spring. Oliver treats the floating platters with an ethereal reverence, riding high on a glassy cloud above the troubles of the world. Lilies are their own kind of perfection, blooming circles of white and green. She also hints at sorrow associated with the lilies; a darkness in the pools below. Less poetically, all this talk of dark water reminded me of Longwood Gardens, the botanical garden mentioned briefly in ContamiNation. The breathtaking lilies in the conservatory there grow in water with Longwood’s proprietary Deep Water dye. Aside from the aesthetic value (the dyed water makes for a striking backdrop not unlike the ponds Oliver describes, and hides the plumbing beneath), the treatments also protect the ponds from algal growth. I share in Oliver’s fascination of the water lilies and the larger water platters, though there are yet other notable qualities in the plants besides their tender leaves. Lilies are kind of creepy from a physiological standpoint. The blossoms and dishes, while picturesque from the top, delve into the realm of Science Fiction just beneath the surface. Rings of razor sharp teeth radiate out from the center, where hairy leviathan tendrils connect the leaves to the main plant concealed in the black below. Their bark is worse than their bite, so to speak, but the less glamorous side of the water lily is still an imposing sight that greatly contrasts the elegant top. In this way, they’re like the dams on the Susquehanna. They’re capable of great beauty, but flip the issue over and you see the teeth.