I have a new batch of rivers. These weren't personal to me so I don't mind sharing them. I got the Potomac, Shenandoah (tributary of the Potomac), and the New (tributary of the Kanawha).
The first was the New River. I had a mild interest in it as one of three rivers that crosses the Appalachians (along with French Broad and Susquehanna), but I didn't know much about it otherwise and had it saved for a later trip to West Virginia. I ended up stumbling across it on accident when I happened to take a detour to Stephen Austin, founding father of Anglo-Texan settlement, birthplace. Like, something I didn't know about at all. Here's this monument and here's this boat ramp giving access to the river right next to it. So then i had a wonderful basis for a prayer not just on its age but also on the theme of new creations and the world to be (while Texas was not a "castizo futurist" state, early intermarriages between the Tejanos and Texians being followed shortly after by the Texians becoming oppressive to the former, I do see its culture, syncretic of Mexican and Southern, as a model for the future of the Golden Circle as a whole).
Afterwards I saw a double rainbow followed shortly after by a single rainbow and a beautiful misty rain and amber in the sky over the Southwest Virginia hills, which I took for an omen that God was particularly pleased, perhaps because I also made a point to make Jesus more of a focus of it too.
The next was the Potomac. Awful river. It was storming, so mind that when I anthropomorphize it, it was just the elements on that day. But it was wild, trying to throw me back out of the water. Vomiting me up. I felt my own body rejecting it. City rivers CAN be tolerable, but storms suck more filth into the water than usual, and the whole business was very uncomfortable. While dealing with this thing I got pissed enough - feeling of contempt and frustration with the whole Beltway area, an abomination - that I did something completely new and exorcised the fucking thing. Clean it instead of melt into it. Reversal of intentions. Did not feel like it achieved anything at all. If I could have done it anywhere I wanted I would have done it at Mount Vernon (didn't for a couple of reasons).
Finally I did the Shenandoah. Had no specific idea going in, but felt it's somewhat famous enough to not just pass by. It ended up being nice. Came to me easily when I walked into it. Faster river, had to be careful. Thomas Jefferson built Monticello with his office (I think, could have been the cupola) facing directly towards a gap in the mountains, Swannanoa or something, into the Shenandoah Valley. Charlottesville was basically the last of civilization before frontier at the time, and so it was a very meaningful choice to situate his great house facing towards the American interior where he intended to build his Empire of Liberty. Likewise Shenandoah was the site of Stonewall Jackson's famous Valley Campaign, where an army outnumbered about three-to-one inflicted about three-to-one casualties in a brilliant campaign of erratic, spastic movements and ballsiness. It was basically his magnum opus (like Chancellorsville was Lee's), I think you could say. Jackson was a staunch Calvinist and, from all I've ever heard of him, a genuinely good person living in a bad society. So I prayed on themes related to that: the idea of the new world to settle, of sacrifice in defense of a homeland (Jackson's death at Chancellorsville arguably doomed the Confederacy as much as anything) and how a people can destroy themselves/their world in folly turning against earlier principles.
I was struck that evening by the appearance of what I thought was Venus hanging high in the sky, kind of near the Moon, when it was still dusk, beautiful orange glow and clouds all around. Well, I think it was actually Spica tonight (I'm only just learning to read the sky). Mind you, I don't believe in astrology in the sense of a systematic science of deducing the future from universal signs. It's just too obviously falsifiable. I do believe that a phenomenon visible to multiple people can be interpreted with meaning, and with different meanings, to those different people. In my mistake I took it for an omen that there was a promise of matrimonial love.
Edit: I have also done the Watauga at Sycamore Shoals, tributary of the Holston which is a short one feeding the Tennessee. Watauga was the site of a de facto independent state that existed in the years before the Revolution. It didn't seek independence, but as Britain refused to administer squatter settlements beyond the Line of Proclamation it was effectively its own state and it quickly aligned with the Patriots. Went on to become the core of the State of Franklin and by extension the State of Tennessee, sister to Kentucky as one of the few states whose colonization was borne in the Revolution and would be the launching pad for the colonization of the great American interior. The locals like to portray it, though it exaggerates greatly, as the first of the American Revolution (there was already an insurgency in Appalachian North Carolina before Lexington and Concord, but again, it was not a separatist movement yet). Was difficult. Hot Summer but absolutely freezing, fast-moving mountain water.
