It was the only River, like one’s childhood house is the only House, and one’s childhood car is the only Car. Or the only car—in a peculiar delusion of mine at age five—that has people in it. The rest all drive on their own.
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The City was the only city. It was found at the mouth of the River, and we went there with some frequency. Those were days of awe and exhaustion. I took both into my body.
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Growing up two hours north of Manhattan in the Hudson River Valley, I was raised with directionality, with orientation. It was always about which side of that River we were on, and how far from the City. My mother’s family was working class and lived on the Upper West Side. My father’s was from “the country” on the east side of the River. I was their admixture.
I did not swim in the River—nobody swam in it back then—but it swam in me. For all the times my eyes absorbed the River’s blue-black field, for all the drives along its flank and across its width on a handful of bridges, for all its smells and its wall of cold and its sound of lapping wavelets and the look of it swooshing by from inside a car or a commuter train—a catalogue of River built in me, an archive that told me, always, where I was.
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The City and the River were unquestionably joined. The River changed as it went down toward the City. The City changed when it left the River—I mean, when we were in a part of the City where we couldn’t see the River, everything was different. When we left for home and found the River again, tracking it north as it flowed to our left, it felt right, like a good friend. And the Car was so warm. When we pulled at last into our driveway, a ninety degree turn in contrast to the minor waves of the northbound Taconic State Parkway, my sleeping body knew I was home, and awoke.
*
The City made me nervous, not because it was scary, but because I sensed there was too much to be seen and to be done. I wanted to see and do it all, and I also—like a child, like a human—wanted to rest. I once loved who I was when I was nervous, though eventually I did not. I wanted to rest by the River, but the River was forever sending me away, like a robin edging its young out from the nest. The River seemed to want to send people away to the City alongside itself, and it seemed to want to bring them back as well. These movements confused me, but they also made me a person.
*
Some nameless sediments in me felt the River, felt the City, moved toward and with them both. It feels them both today. I am still moved by the River, especially, even though I moved so far away I can barely detect its tugging.
Some nights my toes trail off the bottom of the bed. Is that my body being called east? But most nights I am where I am, and even more: my body is west, and pulled west, and further west.
*
I came to San Francisco almost thirteen years ago and have lived all this time in the Sunset District, most of it on 48th Avenue, steps from the Great Highway that parallels Ocean Beach: a place draped in fog and salt that peeled the paint off our car and rusted its muffler.
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When we lived in the in-law apartment on 48th Avenue, our cross street was Rivera, and from the beginning that name evoked for me something about a shore, a river, a rio. In fact the etymology bears that out: it’s a Spanish surname derived from the word ribera, or riverbank. In this case the name was that of a Mexican-born Governor of “the Californias” under Spanish colonial rule.
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Now we live way up the hill from the beach on Judah Street, in a building with a garage where our car’s inevitable disintegration is on pause. Judah Street happens to be named after a man from Troy, New York, a city on the banks of the Hudson River north of Albany. Theodore Judah engineered a way for the transcontinental railroad to cross the Sierra Nevada, dying at age 37 from yellow fever six years before the route was completed. I’ve seen how faraway places fold in on each another, touching as if via tesseract. I once came across an early English-language map of New Amsterdam, created after the British had wrested the island of Manhattan away from the Dutch. On this map, Broadway is labeled “The Great Highway.”
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In my near-decade of beachside life, I spent hundreds of hours walking on the sand barefoot, my feet and calves flirting with the surf. A few days a year at low tide, wide rivulets of ocean water would snake through the sand, making delightful and unexpectedly deep pools of standing sea and silt into which I could sink. It was like walking up a creek back east: the pleasureful interplay of flesh and stinging water varying with the contour of the ground beneath it. A current shaped by the earth into frothing eddies, whitewater over the biggest rocks, running clear in the reaches.
Wading in a freshwater creek up to my ankles or my knees or sometimes nearly my hips had been the thing that made me feel most alive, most able to breathe, to see, to speak. Now, on Ocean Beach, these saltwater channels rippled with similar forces that pushed the sand into ribs and dips, following a set of laws simple yet inscrutable. At dusk or in plain day, going numb and stiff-limbed the longer I walked, it was a whole-body feeling of home that I was starting to reconstruct. All the creeks I knew fed the Hudson River, of course.
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One of the Hudson’s many false names—“Hudson,” of course, being another—is Shatemuc, meaning “Pelican River.” This name was invented by white colonists, loosely based on a real Indigenous word. Its falseness notwithstanding, I was comforted to learn the name because in my time living by the Pacific, far from home, I had spiritually tethered myself to the enormous vees of pelicans—fifty, sixty, seventy at a time—that would pass majestically overhead at certain times of year. The vees were on my list of “things that quicken the heart,” as Sei Shonagon puts it in The Pillow Book, even as they placed me in a mindset of surrender and serenity. My first and only tattoo, on my left inner wrist, is a stylized representation of one of these vees.
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Years before the tattoo, my parents asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I was feeling my new western tethers tighten day by day, so I searched online for a talisman to keep me spellbound to home, a stay against forgetting.
I found a jeweler who made miniature landscape paintings in precious metal. The necklace was a wide rectangular silver frame with three horizontal layers. At the top, an open void of sky, i.e., skin. The middle was a rippling silver section of the Catskill Mountains, a tiny gold sun going down behind them. The bottom was a thick, greenish-gray stripe of patinated silver meant to represent the Hudson River. This was the view looking west from the River’s eastern bank—an image more or less imprinted on the inside of my eyelids, but one that I felt I needed to own.
Not long after I received the necklace, some water splashed on the patina, creating a light splotch on its otherwise-dark surface. It hurt to wear a symbol of something I so loved now marked with my carelessness. “Remember, no swimming,” the jeweler had warned on her site. The irony—that the River is ruined if the River gets wet—was not lost on me.
*
I got used to explaining the necklace to Californians. Then one day, instead of asking, a friend told me what it was: a sunset at Ocean Beach. What I knew as mountains were in fact thick pillows of marine layer fog. The River was the sea.
This felt both nauseatingly wrong and very, very right.
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One moonless night, I was headed home from the Muni stop at 46th and Taraval, walking north on the Great Highway footpath, parallel to the beach.
The ocean was invisible beyond the sand, flat and unforthcoming, the roaring void-sound of waves giving a much truer sense of the water’s scale than anything I could see. This dropping-off of the known, this companionate blankness on my left both living and static, felt suddenly familiar. Then it hit me: It’s the Hudson.
I had lived by the sea for almost a decade, walked that path thousands of times, and this was the first it had occurred to me: this daily journey was a recapitulation of all the thousands of rides along the River I had ever taken. I was walking, but I was in my parents’ Car. I was sitting on a train as it sped north toward Poughkeepsie, the River a mystery running with me all the way home.
The blackness of waterspace at my side: the ocean had become the River had become the ocean had become all water.
*
Eventually, as a teenager, I came to feel strong in New York. The City, or the very thought of it, would infuse me with the means to do anything, everything. It still made me anxious, but it also charged my batteries. Now it drains them on a cellular level. Never-enoughness is draining. And I’d become skilled at draining myself in an utterly unconscious way. This feeling followed me up the River, and it followed me across the country.
And then San Francisco—at least the version of San Francisco that I encountered—unraveled and unwound my knotted-up body.
The ingrained energy of gripping, of clutching, was what it meant to be raised in the orbit of something as powerfully chaotic and high-stakes as New York City. Even the peace of the River couldn’t fix that.
Instead, the act of staring out across an expanse of water, letting its silence nest in my limbs and loosen them, is something I claimed for myself here: at the ocean.
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These two gestures coexist in me somatically: an unsettling settledness, or a settled—meaning constant—unsettling. And a kind of satisfaction.
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Yes, I have receded from the River—geographically, temporally. That was my choice. But it also receded from me.
Long before I was born, a collection of barriers conspired to build distance between my human body and the River’s actual waters. In some places, these barriers were the ruins of bygone riparian industries and highways constructed in the myopia of midcentury. In other, very different places, they were no trespassing signs posted at the crests of wide private lawns rolling down unseen to the riverbank. But everywhere a tacit understanding that the Hudson, given its chemical filth, was best experienced at a remove, like a painting.
To this day, then, it’s much more difficult to do with the River what I have done so many times with the sea: to stroll slowly inside of it, on foot. To be so close I can tell it is changing me.
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I remember playing in a sheltered little cove of the Hudson in a town called Cold Spring, with my father and my brother. On a pebbly shore, we collected smooth driftwood and spiny black water chestnut fruits (invasive, intractable), a barge’s wake lapping gently at the stones. That was a time when I touched the water. One of the only times.
Part of what makes me feel my center has shifted: it’s so much more possible, in California, to be in a certain kind of touch.
*
My comfort with the Pacific surf, my sense of belonging to its motion, is a referent to the ghost-path I am always walking with that eastern River. This new shore is a version of a place I have been promised.
But I know it’s a place I will never truly inhabit—a place that doesn’t, in the end, exist. Thomas Wolfe, writing of the Hudson Valley in his novel Of Time and the River, termed it “a landscape such as one might see in dreams, in dreams forever haunted by the thought of home.”
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And so, I can say now that California has overtaken New York for me: the Pacific coast has replaced the Hudson River as the instinctual shoreline of my heart. I’ve been gone from home so long I’ve drifted into a new gravitational field, like all the streams in a watershed on one side of the continental divide.
There is a real loss that comes with this flipping of intimacies, saltwater overtaking fresh—though the Hudson is itself a brackish estuary where those two kinds mix. But I have built a deeper relationship with Ocean Beach than with any single place or being in New York, the River included. Nine years, on 48th Avenue, of hosing that black magnetic sand off my feet, nine years of it nevertheless sifting down into the cream-colored carpet that was already old when we moved in and which, when we finally moved out, was twelve shades lighter underneath the furniture than it was underfoot.
Still, I feel the twinning, and I no longer experience it as a problem. Poet David Whyte, raised in both Ireland and the English county of Yorkshire, puts it like this: “I remember...realizing that I wasn’t supposed to choose between the two places...I was supposed to live out the conversation between them both.”
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One recent December day I took my toddler to the beach, nostalgia-parking near our old building as I always do. As he always does, he delighted in simply running, simply falling onto the sand in hysterics, simply stomping on intact sand dollars (to my semi-horror). And when we found a miniature cliff of hardened sand, and he saw how the sand spilled fluidly down the cliff’s face when he raked it with his little fingers, he exclaimed: River!
It was for him that we moved up the hill, a five-minute drive to a bigger apartment where we can no longer hear the waves. It was for myself that I came to California in the first place. This is all more than okay. This is all, actually, simple. As Akiko Busch says of the Hudson’s estuarine nature: “...the river, in fact, is one continuous wave.” With enough time, water erodes everything. Even contradictions.
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Sarah Heady is a poet and essayist interested in place, history, and the built environment. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Comfort (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022, finalist for the National Poetry Series) and Niagara Transnational (Fourteen Hills, 2013, winner of the Michael Rubin Book Award). Her latest project, “The Hudson Lines,” was a semifinalist for Tupelo Press’ 2025 Helena Whitehill Award and received an honorable mention for Green Linden Press’ 2025 Wishing Jewel Prize. Sarah’s writing has appeared in such journals as Fence, Jewish Currents, Chartreuse, Speculative Nonfiction, Contra Viento, Ghost Proposal, and OmniVerse. She is the recipient of residencies from the Corporation of Yaddo, In Cahoots, Bethany Arts Community, and Art Farm. Raised in the Hudson River Valley of New York State, she now lives in San Francisco.