East to West along a Turkish river
William ARMSTRONG - william.armstrong@hdn.com.tr
The Meander River, known in Turkey as the “Büyük Menderes,” is a longitudinal squiggle that roughly bisects the westernmost reaches of the country. Ovid wrote of “soft Meander’s wanton current,” while Herodotus established “meander” as a byword signifying digression when he used it to describe a mazy stretch of the Nile. As Jeremy Seal writes at the beginning of this book, “to me, the word encapsulated the freewheeling, romantic spirit that was the essence of true traveling.” Welcoming “the freedom to drift gently downstream,” he decides to take his canoe down the Meander’s winding 500 km toward the Aegean Sea. Unafraid to embrace cliché, he writes that the journey would allow him to reflect on “the rich past of this valley on the historic borders of Asia and Europe, East and West, as well as to its present.”
Indeed, miniature hydroelectric dams, controversial elsewhere in Turkey, have precipitated a stark drop in water levels along much of the Meander in recent years, and have even completely dried it out in many places, compelling Seal to spend much of his journey on foot. At other points he’s forced out of his canoe by industrial effluents belched out by the factories along much of the Meander’s course - copper and lead, chromium and nitrates, chlorides and sulphides. Negotiating an assault course of bloated animal cadavers, fallen willows and industrial pollution does not make for a white knuckle thrill ride; nor is it a journey particularly redolent of the ancient territory on which the Meander is located. But Seal manages to keep his chin up and plod along, observing laconically that “the Meander was not proving the carefree experience I had imagined.”
Seal’s narrative would probably have been more sensational if he had instead chosen the Euphrates or the Tigris for his trip, and his book would likely have attracted more attention. But the Meander serves his purpose well enough. The book ultimately comes to no particular climax; instead, the author prefers to meander along eccentrically, rather like the river itself. That digressiveness may try the patience of some readers, but most will find Seal a companionable guide to Anatolia’s ancient and modern idiosyncrasies.