The Secret of Crossings

On being good guests in an increasingly inhospitable world

The world outside my window is covered in a fine, gently falling mist as I write this. The water drips off the leaves of young willow and birch lining the banks of a usually meandering stream now swollen with the last few days of heavy rain we’ve seen.

That stream is the Roudemerbaach, named for the reddish tint to the water from the iron-rich clay of this land, and starts not far from my home. We live in a high valley between two ridges of hills, the other sides of which descend much more steeply than our sides. So the Roudemerbaach, along with its sister the Faaschtbaach (my favorite stream here, the ‘fasting’ creek), which starts at the foot of an ancient sacred oak, are both somewhat gentle streams.

The two meet just below the place where the last wolf of this land was killed in the late 1800’s (wolves just returned, by the way, and some sheep have been found mauled just a few kilometers for that very place). Soon after they meet, they join the Syre, then meet the Sûre, and then eventually join the Moselle, then the Rhine, before flowing out to sea.

On the other side of these hills, the White Ernz joins the Black Ernz, along with the Alzette (which runs through the center of Luxembourg city, and is the cause of the massive gorge which cuts through it) and meet the Sûre downstream from where the creek outside my window meets it.

All these streams flooded last night.

Last night, just as we had started cooking dinner, we got a panicked call from my partner’s best friend. The police¹ had arrived to warn everyone in their town that the river would flood its banks in a particularly dangerous way, a “100 year flood.”

She and her family live along the banks on the German side of the Sûre (from their side, it is called the Sauer). Their village is just upstream from my stream’s eventual meeting with the river, but just downstream from where the streams starting on the other side of this hill meet it.

On the German side, another river, the Prüm, joins the Sauer just a few kilometers upstream from their village, meaning they were just below the confluence of three flooding rivers.

We quickly changed into work clothes, and my partner drove us to their home. The rain was quite intense, and quite a few fallen trees blocked the streets, causing us to need to reroute several times. The primary bridge across the Sauer to their village was blocked off, so we needed to detour yet again upriver before crossing.

Not driving, I could watch with awe the world of water the land had become. It may seem morbid to some, but I love “natural disasters,” by which I mean not the destruction they cause but the raw and profound natural forces that they are.

Disasters are horrible. But the floods, forest fires, heatwaves, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and all these other natural things which cause them were once seen as gods themselves, or the manifestations of gods. When we humans once looked above us into the night sky to find meaning, rather than into the glowing screens in our hands, we saw the stars as connected to the events of our lives. A disaster was an dis-astra, a “bad” or “ill” star, a moment when our connection to lights incomprehensibly far from human existence was somehow sundered (the pre-Latin root of dis-).

I watched as the rivers rose around us, staring in particular awe at the force of the Prüm as we crossed it. Just before it joined the Sauer, its waters seemed to jump straight upward as if they came from deep within the earth itself. It was both beautiful and terrifying to watch, and it boded poorly for the fate of this friend’s village, but nevertheless, seeing such power, three words escaped my lips:

“Hail to you,” I said.

I don’t know when I started doing this, but it’s been years now. I greet the moon, or particularly ancient trees, or an intensely warm sun, or a lightning storm or strong wind this way. Also I say this to animals of particular presence, as I do when there are wild boars about or the night I heard a wolf howl on a nearby hill. Most ravens get greeted this way, especially when they assemble and conspire in the branches of the ancient oak outside our home.

“Hail” is the old Nordic/Germanic word for “health” and “fortune,” and is also the root of the English word “holy” via German heilige. “Health” has the same root, as well. Thus, something that was holy was healthy, that is “whole” and “intact,” and thus full of fortune. Saying ‘hail’ to someone wishes them those virtues, or acknowledges those virtues, which in the animist mind is the exact same thing.²

Perhaps to even admit such a thing makes me seem an awful person to some, but these massive and uncontrollable forces are beautiful to me. They fill me with awe and a strange sense of delight when they happen. It isn’t the destruction they cause from which these emotions and reverence arise, but rather their very existence as something pure and true and fully outside of our human world.³

We crossed the Prüm and arrived in the village to which we had sped. The friend’s house is quite old, a beautiful place I imagine in less chaotic times. We had arrived just as others had, her cousin, another friend, two neighbors. She hugged us, and though I do not know her well it was not hard to imagine what the look on her face meant about how she was feeling.

The village was predicted to experience a “100 year flood.” This system of years for flooding doesn’t mean that it’s a flood that happens every 100 years, but rather indicates how reasonably one can be prepared for such a flood.

For instance, a 5 year flood means that one can reasonably expect that level of flooding to occur very often, and therefore no houses should be built in any area that would be under water during such a flood. The higher the year count, the less likely such a flood is to occur, meaning the safer it is to assume you can build in those places.

Her house, as well as almost all the other houses in that village, were built just outside of the 100 year flood zone, meaning they could reasonably expect never to have their homes flooded in their lifetimes. That’s not a guarantee, of course, but such accounting is how we all live our lives. I know the risk is very small that I will ever be hit by lightning, so I don’t need to accommodate that possibility into my daily activities. Riding a bicycle without a helmet means I increase my risk of brain damage, and though I rarely crash I accommodate for that risk by wearing one.

It took us all several hours, but we accomplished what we had driven to her home for. We moved everything that could be destroyed by water from the ground floor to the floor above, and what couldn’t be brought up the narrow stairway because of its size or weight we hoisted onto paving stones.

It was hardly easy, despite how many people there were. Of course, not all of them were there to lift or move things, but rather just to be there.

This sort of thing happens in villages and rural areas all the time and in cities almost never. People show up to help even if they cannot do anything physical, because physical help isn’t the only thing needed. You need your friends around for such moments of crisis, even if they sometimes get in the way of the people hauling heavy things around. They’re how you survive such things, how you remember that disasters do not mean the end of your life, only the potential destruction of objects and possessions.

We did what we could. Not everything could be moved, and we all feared that maybe we hadn’t raised everything high enough off the ground. Each time I took a break I stared at the river, watching massive tree branches float past like they were only ducks. It didn’t look good for the village, nor for the home.

When we left, I looked at the river one more time and thought about one of the goddesses of this land. The Treverii, the Celtic people who lived in these lands and whose own name they gave the ancient city of Trier, revered a goddess of river crossings named Ritona.⁴

It’s not difficult to understand why such a being would have their attention and devotion. The land everywhere here is soaked through with streams and rivers which swell and diminish with the rains. To get anywhere without bridges, you need to know where to cross them, and even to build a bridge you must know where the river is best forded, reliably shallow enough throughout the year to hold any bridge supports.

Bridges, though, were more what the Roman conquerors needed for crossing rivers than what the Treverii and the other Celtic peoples here needed. You can ford a river with your cattle or a small cart, but you cannot ford it with a chariot or carts laden with war supplies. So, any people resisting the advance of an empire dependent on flat surfaces for their armies would do best to rely instead on these hidden tracks across rivers.

Far to the northeast of these lands, the pagan Lithuanians (the last pagan kingdom in Europe) built a system of hidden river and swamp crossings called kulgrindas. The logic behind these was the same: invading imperial armies (in this case, the Christian Knights Templar, charged with eradicating the last holdout of paganism from Europe) full of armored men, are slow and need roads. The pagan Lithuanians needed their own paths, too, but came up with an ingenious way to hide them from the Christians.

They created kulgrindas. Kulgrindas are made by piling gravel, rocks, and logs over a frozen section of swamp or a stream during the winter. When the ice melts, all of this sinks to the bottom, but is nevertheless still covered in water. Only those who made these paths would know where they were, and thus they could ford rivers and cross otherwise impassable marshlands as if they were walking on water. Any group of Christian knights chasing after them would sink into the mud and become trapped, making them easy targets for those they were trying to slaughter.

A river ford, then, isn’t just a convenient path to get from one place to another but a means of protection and survival to those who know them. It’s thus easily evident why the Treverii would have worshiped a goddess of those crossings. Such a goddess would also be not just a being of place, but also the knowledge of those places, a guide along secret paths to friends, to hunting grounds, to sacred sites, and to safety.

Such goddesses are no longer recognized, nor are the gods of natural forces like floods and fires. So certain have we become in our “mastery” over the world that we look at such powers as mere interruptions to our lives to be dealt with, rather than revered or awed.

It’s hard not to think about all this today, hearing the news from this friend. It wasn’t a 100 year flood at all, but much more. The most recent report I’ve heard is that the water flooded through the village up to 1.8 meters, just six centimeters below my own height.

We had done all that we could have possibly done, but it was not enough.

Such a thing cannot be said for the larger world crisis which has increased these floods while unleashing other forces elsewhere. While the land where I live has been unseasonably wet, grey, and cold this summer, the land where I used to live has had unseasonable heat (so hot as to kill and actually cook shellfish on the beaches) and drought.

Ancient peoples are often derided in our modern age for their “superstitious” beliefs that the natural forces which caused human disasters were also spiritual. We think of them as “primitive” or “unenlightened” for treating such things as gods and shaping their lives and actions around such powers.

We forget what such a reverence actually entailed.

They made offerings to rivers and volcanoes, raised shrines to gods of fire and hearths, propitiated and remembered the dead, spoke to the beasts of forests and birds of the air as kin and neighbors, yes. What comes with such a way of seeing the world around them as living and powerful is an inevitable consequence: you shape your own life with such forces in mind.

You revere the river as a goddess, and do not build upon the land she claims as her own. You revere the volcano as an ancestral mother and keep your villages out of the path of her rage. You offer prayers to the hunter-goddess of the great forest and do not take too many of her offspring for your food or too many trees from her cathedral for your own houses.

When we knew the world to be full of gods, we knew that humans were subject to the same hospitality from nature that we offered to each other. We were honored guests on the land, and it was best not to take too much, to shit in the springs or set fire to our surroundings, because hospitality is always conditional on the behavior of the guests.

We lost all that wisdom when empire erased our gods from memory and replaced it with its own god, first named YHVH and now named Progress. But that god doesn’t actually live here with us, but outside all of nature in the pale world of our ideologies. He can’t show us how to cross a river to escape our enemies, nor how to stop that river from claiming more land as her own.

So we do “the best we can,” knowing it’s never going to be enough. The flood which has drowned out most of the ground floor of this friend’s home cannot have been reasonably predicted when the village was built, because the river had never in remembered history claimed it as her own. Not in a 100 years, nor in any of the 800 years of people living there.

And this will only happen more often, everywhere.

I can only hope that perhaps there are still some secret paths that can be forded. Not for all of humanity, nor even for most of humanity, but maybe for the few who still look for those crossings. Those who revere those who guide to us to such knowledge. And those who stand in awe at the larger forces of nature our false god Progress has unleashed.

And I can only hope that those of us who survive learn to live their lives as good guests in an increasingly inhospitable world.

1. There is a reason why “defund the police” isn’t really a big thing here.

2. As much as the “white light” new age idea of manifesting good things by “declaring” them is obnoxious, it’s much closer to the animist idea than the Protestant one of praying for things to be better.

3. And as I said, it’s the same awe I feel when I see a wild boar, or a particularly ancient tree, or when I heard that wolf, so it isn’t the human disasters these forces cause that puts me in such a state of reverence.

4. Her name shares the same root as the Welsh word for river fords, “rhyd,” a name you maybe recognize…