It seems to me that an awful lot of American nostalgia has to do with rivers. Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri, the Rio Grande, the Swanee (even though that one used to be Suwanee until Steven Foster changed it.) Besides the songs, there are old tales of riverboats, the gamblers, the pirates, Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer. It’s a much more softer and mistier history than that of the Old West.
Hell, even Alton Brown did a whole series of Feasting on Asphalt on the Mississippi.
Do other countries regard their river with the kind of yearning reverie that Americans do? Sure, there’s the Strauss waltz “The Beautiful Blue Danube”, but was the Danube looked upon with that kind of sentiment before the song?
There’s also the Ganges, but that’s more of a religious thing.
Yeah,
there’s Anna Livia for one and of course the river Shannon has been celebrated a number of times in song.
Your President Kennedy once quoted these lines in a speech when visiting Ireland;
'Tis it is the Shannon’s brightly glancing stream,
Brightly gleaming, silent in the morning beam,
Oh, the sight entrancing,
Thus returns from travels long,
Years of exile, years of pain,
To see old Shannon’s face again,
O’er the waters dancing.
Don’t forget the Song of the Volga Boatmen in Russia. I get the impression that several Russian/Soviet rivers (Volga, Don, Dneipr) have the same position in the national mythos as the Mississippi, Ohio, and Red for example have in yours.
Egypt must be the worst. They owe their entire national existence to the Nile. At one time it was worshiped as a god.
Then you’ve got Mesopotamia…“the Land Between the Rivers.” The founding human civilization, and the target of successive waves of chariot conquerors since then.
Humans first settled by water and rivers are intertwined with the very experience of human civilization.
And the Chinese regarding the Yellow River as the “Mother River” - cradle and founding place of Chinese Civilization, they even created a statue near the Yellow River to commemorate its status as the Mother River.
I listen to a lot of BBC radio. I’ve heard multiple programs that are basically, “Let’s go up and down river X and talk about how great it used to be and how it’s slightly less great now, but we’re working to fix it.”
If you consider that rivers have always been central to the development of civilization, it would be strange to hear of a culture that didn’t revere it’s rivers. The river brings life, food water, travel, all things very worth becoming sentimental about.
Get two Spaniards, one from the Mediterranean Coast and one from anywhere between the provinces of Lerida and Santander. Place them in the same room. Say “trasvase del Ebro” (building a channel to transfer water from the Ebro Valley to parts further south along the Med coast). Post the resulting catfight on youtube.
We’re less likely to wax poetic about our rivers than Americans are, but the amount of arguing and hairpulling triggered by water-management issues is huge.
When our 9th-grade History Teacher told us about the Egyptians worshipping the Nile because they knew that it was the source of life, that without it they wouldn’t exist, one of my classmates exclaimed “like us with the Ebro!” Yep, just like that, the river brings us from this to this.
Serbs are very sentimental about the Danube and its bridges. During the Kosovo intervention, the US blew up some bridges and it really touched an emotional nerve that went beyond the destruction of other infrastructure in the country.
I think many countries have historic, romantic attachments to their rivers - they were often the main arteries crossing the land and often the best way to get from one place to another (before good roads). For such a large landmass as the US, it doesn’t surprise me that some of your more landlocked compatriots hold romantic views of their waterways.
Having said that, I’m not sure we’re all that romantic about our rivers in the UK. Perhaps being an island, where no one is more than 3 hours drive from the coast, our focus is more on the sea. Hence the popular TV documentary series called Coast
I notice that all the ads at the bottom of this page are now for Danube River Cruises, which might tell you something.
Part of the problem in the UK is that most rivers are in private hands - 96% of our waterways are unavailable for boats, and riverside access is often via private land.
So it’s hard to get misty-eyed over something you never see.
Certain UK rivers have a place in the popular imagination - Old Father Thames, the Tyne, punting along the Cam - and Wind in the Willows and Three Men In A Boat are enduringly popular, but we don’t have the same majestic rivers as the USA.
Bulgarians get misty-eyed over the Danube, too. Which is kind of weird considering it’s the northern border, it’s not like it runs through the center of the country of anything like that.
Now that I think about it, I think some of it has to do with Bulgaria’s tragic revolutionary history. The two most famous Bulgarian revolutionaries, Vassil Levsky and Hristo Botev, both ran away to Romania to escape Turkish persecution for their rabble-rousing. So their eventual crossing of the Dunav (Danube) back to Bulgaria to throw off the SHACKLES and CHAINS of the TURKISH SLAVERY is kind of momentous in Bulgarian history.
Then they both got caught and executed by the Turks. Ooops.
