Just for funzie- I had some Appalachian mountain man in my head writin it so bear with it.

Just for funzie- I had some Appalachian mountain man in my head writin it so bear with it.

The Cartographer and the River

There was a man up our way whose whole callin' was the mappin' of a river.

And I'll grant him this much, he had the gift for it.

He'd walk every bend slow, knowin' it the way you know a hymn, and he'd put a name to every shallow and every deep hole, and he'd set down in ink just where that water'd take a notion to run fast and where it'd lay still and let a body rest.

Filled up book after book thataway. Folks come from over the mountain to buy what he made, and they bought it for one good reason. Them maps was never wrong, and there ain't much in this life you can say that about.

Well. One spring the river up and moved.

Weren't a big thing, not to look at.

The Lord sent down a hard rain, the kind that don't quit, and that water carved itself a brand new channel through the east bank and left the old one to go quiet and green and grow over with moss.

But that man stood at the edge of the new water a long, long while.

He'd walked that old bank with his own two feet.

He had it in ink.

And I'll tell you, there ain't no feud in these hills, not Hatfield nor McCoy, as sore as the one betwixt a man and a thing that won't stay where he put it.

A young'un had followed him out, the way they do, and the boy asked him was all his work ruint now.

The man, he knelt down in the mud and rolled out a clean piece of paper. "The map's ruint," he said. "The work ain't. The work weren't never the paper."

And he commenced to measure again.

Same slow way, same careful hands, like that river hadn't done him no wrong at all.

The boy watched him a spell, and somewhere in the watchin' he come to know the whole of it.

What that man knew how to do weren't havin' a map.

It were makin' one.

The river could wash out every line he ever drawed and it couldn't touch the thing that mattered, on account of that thing lived down in him and not on the paper, and the river don't hold no claim on a man's insides.

They say he never again called a finished map his life's work.

He'd map a stretch, and sell it, and down in the corner he'd write small and honest, good 'til the water decides otherwise.

His maps come and went like the seasons come and go.

And nary a soul asked for their money back, for it eases a body somethin' powerful to be told the truth straight out.

But the measurin'.

The measurin' never stopped.

Plans are nothing.

Planning is everything.