JON WHYTE: Keeper of Place
The Bow River
The business of the river is one of Banff’s sustaining pleasures. I suppose I have looked upon the Bow now for thirty or more summers, and have always found it to be among the most pleasing of rivers . . .
Since the Bow is to me all rivers, Saskatchewan, Nile, Amur and Lena – all other rivers I judge by the Bow, a tough standard. The Ganges can never be so beautifully green as the Bow; for all rivers must be judged by their greenness, the Bow being so beautifully coloured. The Amur, as we saw it a Khabarovsk, is too wide; a river should not be so wide its other bank seems not to be part of the river.
The Mississippi, which I know only from Minneapolis-St. Paul, is too narrow a river, and does not have forest on its far shore, nor sweepers to increase its graciousness. The Ottawa in flood is too tormented, huge, and dangerous. The South Saskatchewan in Medicine Hat flows between hills that are too soft.
But the Bow at Banff is properly wide, wild, shored, and green, gracious, soft, and swift. It would be difficult to find any other river anywhere which sustains itself so riverly.
– Jon Whyte
Crag &
Canyon, May 25, 1978
. . . the Bow River, the gentle green river which has always flowed, flowed longer than the Rockies have stood as the sentinels of time we believe them to be, flowed always on the western edge of the small green world I have always called home.
– Jon
Whyte
Minisniwapta
The river can be a metaphor for how words move and change in space and time. As speech moves through time or volume, creating its own space, a river defines the environment it flows through, creating its shape and responding to it.
– Jon Whyte
Audio Clips: Minisniwapta
(The clips
below are WAV files.)
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