Shall We Gather at the River?

Soon we’ll reach the silver river,

Soon our pilgrimage will cease;

Soon our happy hearts will quiver

With the melody of peace.

American Gospel

I first heard this old hymn at my grandmother’s funeral many years ago as a young child. I remember holding the tattered gray hymnal as we sang, and I envisioned a river flowing by where we would be gathered in celebration of my grandmother’s life. Many years later this hymn would be heard again at the memorial services for both of my parents. I was a woman in my late fifties by then, my parents having lived long good lives and dying just a few weeks apart. There were no hymnals at their services. Instead my brother and I found a beautiful recording of the old hymn, and it was played while we sat in the funeral parlor saying good-bye to these good people for the last time.

It seemed like the wrong location for such a gathering. Once again I envisioned the river, and I wanted to be gathered there instead of in this room with its white walls. There were not many people in attendance. My parents were nearly ninety when they died. Most of their friends and loved ones had already passed.

As the beautiful words were sung, I saw my mother standing over a campfire stirring hash browns, wearing her old blue high school sweater, which she never wore at any other time except when we were camping. My father would be sitting at the picnic table, cleaning trout to be fried crisp with the hash browns. Our old brown Army tent would be pitched nearby, and there would be a river flowing by our campsite.

It did not matter which river ran through my memory of those mornings in camp. There were many of them in our lives as a young family: the Skokomish, Dosewallips, Sol Doc, Quinault. The rivers of the Olympic Peninsula that flow down from the high country read like a poem: Hamma Hamma, Duckabush, Quilcene, Gray Wolf, Dungeness, Elwha, Queets, Hoh, and everybody’s favorite, the Humptulips. Our favorite campground in the Cascades was called Lawiswis, located on the Ohanepecosh River south of Mt. Rainier.

As a young woman I came to enjoy long treks in the Olympics, ascending one long river valley, crossing the pass to the next watershed, and then ending up on the other side of that mountain range. Sometimes my trips would take me up and over several different mountain passes, exploring each new river valley as I descended.

Later I took my long trips every year in the Pasayten Wilderness of the North Cascades, where three three rivers, the Lost River, Pasayten, and Ashnola, flow north into Canada, unusual for North American rivers.

Later after I moved to Wyoming, I spent nights camped next to the Popo Agie, the Wind River, the headwaters of the Green River. On a trip to Rocky Mountain National Park I leaped across the small stream that would become the mighty Colorado as it flowed south and carved its way through red canyon country.

I have forded rivers, drunk from them, gone swimming in them, and have made comfortable camps next to them more times than I could possibly count. I have crawled into my sleeping bag at night, pulled the down around my chin, and listened to the comforting sound of the river voices as I drift off to sleep. There is no sound more beautiful to me.

I have gathered at the silver river, and it never fails to bring the melody of peace the old hymn describes. My mother is still there in her old sweater. Trout is sizzling in the cast iron skillet over the fire, the smell of campfire smoke strong, the sound of the river as it flows past this family, this moment forever preserved as the memory flows, forever sacred.