The last couple of days, I can’t seem to get away from the river.

Yesterday I went for a long walk up the south shore, near my apartment, and watched Canada geese wandering between the sculptures a local artist has made from the rock scattered along the banks. And today at work I got re-assigned to a new project, researching the history of that very same stretch of river.

I spent all day reading about the people who’ve inhabited the Ottawa River valley over the last 14,000 years. I immersed myself in the strange, shifting language of Canadian anthropology: time is strictly organized around the arrival of the white man, divided neatly into pre-contact, proto-contact, contact, and settlement periods, while the people are categorized as Kitchissippis in one document, Kichesepis in another, and Kichi Sipis in a third. At different times the French traders deal with the Iroquois Five Nations, Six Nations, and Seven Nations. The falls are Asticou, a sacred site, to the local Algonquin, and Chaudiere, an obstacle to be portaged around, to the French; now, to the present-day inhabitants, they are the source of power for a major hydro-electric plant.

From the reading room in the national archives, I have a clear view of the river, the Chaudiere Falls upstream and then the two bridges, Chaudiere and Portage, leading to the massive government megaplexes on the Quebec side. Then, below the archives is Victoria Island, and a shallow patch of rapids, before the river widens under the shadow of Parliament Hill. All the way up there, on the third floor of a building whose foundation is already high above the water, it’s impossible to reconcile the people I’m reading about with the river I see. Iroquois raiding parties lying in wait for Algonquin coming down, fur-laden, from Lake Nipissing; solemn Huron burial rites on the rocks below the falls; Jesuits struggling upriver with hair shirts under their black robes, hauling their canoes around the rapids – none of it fits with today’s commuter-choked bridges and faded 1970s office blocks.

On the way home I skipped the bus and walked along the riverside path, trying to force that vanished world of warriors and voyageurs to come alive in my head. I still couldn’t bring them back, but down there, safely behind a thick belt of trees, I could at least pretend that the spread of bungalows and strip malls and low-rise apartments on all sides was gone. I looked around and saw nothing but rock, water, and trees – that much, at least, has never changed.