The Charles in March

The ice doesn’t leave all at once. It retreats from the banks first, where the current is strongest and the warmth of buildings and roads bleeds into the water through the soil. Dark channels open — a few feet wide, then wider — then narrow again on cold nights and widen again when the temperature rises. The river has been doing this for weeks. By the time the ice is gone, you won’t notice the moment it goes.

Along the Cambridge bank, the shell boats come out before daylight. You can hear the coxswain before you see anything — one clipped syllable, then the rhythm, then the shell moving past at that speed that looks like floating, which is deceptive because it is entirely effort. Eight rowers exhaling in unison. The breath visible in the air, then gone.

The geese are here all winter now. Most of them stopped migrating years ago — learned that the city holds warmth, that the lawns stay accessible, that people bring bread though the signs say not to. They stand at the ice margins in small groups. A Canada goose in March has the coloring of old military equipment: olive drab, black, the white chin-patch that looks like a marking rather than a feature. They have the patience of animals who have made a calculation and are not second-guessing it.

The water color is difficult to describe accurately. Not brown, not green, not gray, but somewhere in the neighborhood of all three and shifting with the angle of light. In the afternoon — and in March the sun is still low enough that afternoon light comes in horizontal and makes everything look the way things look at dusk even at noon — the surface catches it in small, rapid movements. The river has no surface, not really. What you’re seeing is the top of something that goes down twelve feet at the deepest point of the main channel, more in places, a depth that the crews never think about and the geese never think about and that only the bridges think about, if bridges think.

The Weeks Bridge was built in 1927 and is a pedestrian bridge, arched stone, worn in the middle where feet have crossed it for almost a hundred years. In March it is usually empty at the hours when the ice is working and the shells are out. Sometimes a runner crosses it, intent on their own breathing, their own mathematics of miles. Sometimes no one. The bridge does its job regardless.

Water, when it freezes, expands. This is unusual among substances — most things contract when they cool. Ice floats because of this. The ice floating on the Charles in late winter is the same ice that has been forming and melting and reforming for weeks, touched by the same current, the same cold, the same bridges. It carries silt in it. It carries the faint chemical signature of everything the river has passed through — the suburbs upstream, the industries that ran along these banks for two centuries, the runoff from a hundred thousand winter lawns. It doesn’t look like it carries any of this. It looks like nothing except light.

Upstream from the bridges, the river broadens into the Upper Charles, which is less urban, more marshy in places — red-winged blackbirds in the cattails by April, though not yet in March. Right now the cattails are last year’s, gone to fluff and broken at the tops, listing in what remains of winter. The red-wings are moving north but haven’t arrived. The river is waiting for them or isn’t — the river doesn’t wait, exactly, but it will be there when they come.

What happens here in March happens every March, or something close enough to every March to deserve the word every. The ice returns and leaves. The shells return. The geese never left. The bridge keeps its tally of footsteps without meaning to. Somewhere in the record of this — if anyone is keeping it, and no one is — there is a March in 1890 when the ice was thicker and lasted longer and there were no shells and no geese because the geese were still flying south the way they were supposed to. There is a March in 2005 when the ice barely formed at all, a thin rime on still mornings that burned off by ten. There is this March, which the river is currently in the middle of, with no opinion about what kind of March it is.

The water goes to the harbor. The harbor goes to the ocean. The ocean is where this water was before it was rain, before it was a river, before anyone named it anything.