An ode to my penultimate semester at college.

You know those moments when a topic from one part of your life suddenly shows up in a totally unrelated part? Like when a weirdly specific subject you just talked about at lunch randomly appears again at work the next morning, or pops up with a completely different group of people later that week and it feels a little like a glitch in the matrix? Or that you’re Truman in The Truman Show?

Well that happened to me a few weeks ago in my morning geology class. The topic of the day was meandering rivers and streams, and my professor had “Rivers and Roads” by The Head and the Heart playing as we all filed into our seats. I’ve never considered myself to be science-minded— or at least it takes me twice as long to grasp concepts than it seems it does most— but geology has grabbed my attention more firmly than I expected. Apparently, as we learned that morning, most rivers and streams are “meandering,” which I thought sounded poetic for a scientific term. According to my professor, most rivers in Asheville are meandering, which essentially means a river that forms on low-gradient or relatively flat land and has a single winding chain.

The reason they meander is surprisingly elegant: water on the outer bend of a curve flows faster and erodes the bank, while water on the inner bend flows more slowly and deposits sediment. Over time, this constant erosion and deposition exaggerates each curve, causing the river to migrate across its floodplain, hence creating the meandering effect.

I didn’t give this much further thought until a few hours later, in a literature class, my professor read Inversnaid by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poem describing none other than the movement of a meandering stream.  The rhythm of the poem actually mimics the movement of a stream (one word pulls you into the next, like a current that pulls you into the stream, the mini whirl pools) the language does what the river does. “Flutes and lows to the lake, falls home” (water falls into the lake). This particular rhythm is one that Hopkins himself literally just made up and called sprung rhythm, which approximates poetic meter to speech and for one stressed syllable, follows several lines of unstressed syllables. I love when creative people can’t find a form that fits them and so they just make their own.

I felt, as I was sitting in that class, my little neurons from the left and right side of my brain, firing off and creating new pathways between each other. And I had the nerdiest thought that this is exactly why the liberal arts matter, and that this is why we need the jacks of all trades, and why expertise in only one area isn’t always the flex people think it is. What’s the point of knowledge if you can’t connect it to any other area?

I’ve always shied away from science because it’s not been my strongest subject historically. Creative writing, though, has always been my girl. So now, thanks to hearing a poem about meandering streams just hours after a geology lecture about meandering streams, my little creative brain will always remember why streams meander (scientifically).

I’ve just finished my penultimate semester and am heading into my holidays, and I really cannot believe that I only have one more left to go. I’m only slightly dreading it because I’ve saved my only required math class for last (how considerate of myself), but I can already smell the sweet scent of a chapter closing on this decade-long ordeal. Maybe my creative writing class next semester will discuss mathematical literary forms, and some more synapses will happen. If you’ve made it this far, that’s really cute of you. Thank you for being here. I hope you enjoy your holidays if you celebrate them, and stay tuned for a podcast I’m about to post. It’s a project I did with a classmate that turned out surprisingly well, so if you wanna hear us speak bitterly of early nineteenth-century literary misogyny for 20 minutes, you’re in for a treat. To get it right into your inbox subscribe below! I promise I don’t spam.