A Watch Over Time

When you wake, you often hear the River before you see it in the morning. Water moves beneath the docks, slapping softly against the boards and rocks. Somewhere beyond the next island, a loon calls.

As you open your eyes, you see red and green channel markers blinking in the half-light, and single porch lights glowing across the channel, through the Narrows, or wherever you are, surrounded by darkness. All of it signaling.

Then more sounds. It could be the low rumble of an engine, the sound arriving before the boat itself, a woody, a tour boat, a freighter making its way toward you. Then you see it.

And then the light. The sun begins to rise, reflecting across the water like broken glass, catching the granite shoreline and the pine trees growing from narrow cracks in the rocks. You wake to all of it at once, wondering how all of this can be.

This morning I looked at my watch, watched the tick of the second hand, and realized entire years have somehow vanished behind me. We lived every single moment, and still, somehow, the years passed. But here we are. Awake, alive, wondering how all of that became then.

Maybe that is the deception of the River. Everything seems to move slowly here. Water against the dock. A boat coming through the Narrows. The sun crossing from one side of the island to the other. Morning becoming afternoon. Yet somewhere inside all that slowness, days become summers, children grow up, people come and go, and years disappear.

The second hand still moves exactly as it always has, one small tick at a time.

And yet our children, raised in summers at the River, are now working, getting married, building lives and families of their own. Weren’t they just running down the dock? Swimsuits on, Amy’s watchful eye following close behind. “Don’t you dare go in too deep!” carried through the air as they raced toward the water. “Go in. Don’t go.” Somehow, I think those two warnings became one word to them, goindongo, as they prepared to jump anyway.

There were wet towels thrown wherever wet towels could be thrown, dogs shaking River water onto the porch, rainy afternoons spent over puzzles and games, boats coming and going, and everyone eventually finding their way back to the table for dinner. Year after year, the faces around that table changed almost imperceptibly. Some grew older. Some grew up. Some are no longer there.

None of it seemed to be passing while we were living it.

This is the strange bargain of time. Up close, it hardly seems to move at all. Look back, and everything has.

But we keep time. We keep it in the people we miss, in the stories told again around the table, and in the children who now run down the same dock we once did. The River does not remember for us. It gives us a place to remember together.

Meanwhile, the screen door still slams, though fewer times in a day. The same floorboards still creak. The River still presses against the dock as though no time has passed at all. Maybe there is a kindness in that, even if there is some sadness in it.

The River does not keep time the way we do. We count seconds and years, beginnings and endings. The River simply keeps moving.

As I wind my watch, I watch the second hand continue its journey.

One second at a time.

And I wonder, as I always have, where it all begins and where it all ends.

By Mark E. Russell

Mark Russell is a graduate of St. Lawrence University and Western New England University School of Law. He has brought legal precision and narrative clarity to every venture he has led, from early-stage companies and global agencies to CatalystXL, the software-as-a-service company he founded to simplify how organizations communicate, operate, and scale. Mark has written for several publications, including Detroit’s TBD Magazine. He also contributed to Mastering Communication at Work and contributed to two chapters for the New
York Times bestseller Spend Shift.

Mark and his wife, Amy Saunders Russell, live in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan, . They have three River Rat children: Sam and Trey of Grosse Pointe Farms, and Emma, who lives in Colorado with her husband, Jarrod, and their son, Ronan, the Russell’s first grandchild. Mark and Amy divide their time between their home on Lake St. Clair in Grosse Pointe Farms, and Idle Isle in the Thousand Islands.