Listing to Port

1. This river flowed from the mountains to the sea sometime during the Cretaceous; I am not sure which sea and which mountains, for things were different then. It was a major thoroughfare for the little dinosaurs who lived in and around it. There are those who say that the histories of the dinosaurs are out there waiting to be discovered; fossil footmarks in sand noting which dinosaur sold what to which other dinosaur, who pissed against which tree, and so forth. If so, and if only we could read them, the river would feature prominently. But I think that they do not exist, and there was no-one else there to remember it,

2. There was an old kingdom, and the ruling family had acquired many enemies. Fortunately, they had a large dungeon, and the large dungeon was full of their many enemies. One day, the river that fed the castle moat rose up beyond its accustomed high water point and swept away a chunk of the dungeon wall; whereupon the enemies took it upon themselves to float off into the torrent on rafts improvised from the broken remains of torture equipment. The ruling family, having no other target for its ire, settled on the river. It was subjected to a kind of Damnatio Memoriae. An army of scholars spent months excising references to it from the royal libraries, and an army of serfs worked to divert its sources. Eventually there was a famine and an uprising led by the escaped enemies, and the people sat around bonfires fed with the censored books, and everyone had more important things on their mind than rivers. And so it was that the enforced forgetting, surprisingly, stuck.

3. There was a little stream that wound around a housing estate, between a boggy stretch of hillside and a boating lake. It was the sort of feature that people know about but don’t think to record. Nobody came to map it, and nobody had a name for it. It was not very interesting, except to the frogs. Eventually, they came to expand the housing estate. Someone put in an anonymous pipe to carry the water, and it was paved over. The frogs moved out (the ones who migrated up the hillside were notably more successful than those who headed into town). The stream was forgotten.

4. There were three hundred little rivers in the delta. For a while there was a city there, a kind of proto-Venice in which the delta’s rivers became streets, and little assignations and petty infamies were committed in this river as in the others, and the city’s ruins sank into the mud here as elsewhere when its short time was over. For a while stories were told of these streets even as they rotted away. But one of the other river-streets had had a mysterious floating body whose clothes were those of a man from the far North; and another had a barge full of monkeys which was the result of an unwise bet by the bezoar-seller; and in another the queen of the city dropped a famous pearl and promised the ownership of a cursed tower to whoever might retrieve it. So it was the other rivers that were remembered and that went into the scanty histories of the time, even as the silt of the delta shifted and the river itself went away.

5. It was a slow and stagnant river, and had the most amazing fauna; such suckers, so many legs, so many body segments! Everyone who passed the river took a good long look at it and decided that, on balance, they would prefer not to remember it.