Straddling the Hudson

The Hudson River that separates New York from New Jersey is a large river, deep and wide. In places it is more than a mile in width. Washington Irving long ago described it as "the lordly Hudson". It is indeed lordly, majestic.

And yet, I was able to straddle it, standing over it with one foot on the right bank and one foot on the left.

That could, of course, not be done where it is more than a mile wide. It could only be done where it is nothing but a tiny stream, up in the mountains, at its source.

We were driving northwards through the mountains past Lake George to Lake Champlain with New York State on one shore and Vermont on the other shore. On our way we passed by the place where the Hudson had its source. We stopped to look at it. It was a tiny stream, and I straddled it – as I was later to do, straddling the earth’s Equator in the highlands of Ecuador, with one foot in the northern hemisphere and one foot in the southern.

As I stood over the tiny stream, with one foot in each bank, I thought to myself, "Can this tiny stream let be the same river as the majestic Hudson down below?"

It is the same phenomenon with plants. A tiny acorn becomes a mighty oak tree. Those colossal trees in California, the red Sequoia in the Sierra Nevada, were once upon a time tiny acorns. They have grown to become these gigantic trees, with trunks as wide as a house, and towering up to the skies.

It is the Gospel parable of the mustard seed that grows into a large plant. Or of the small amount of yeast that bloats a large mass of dough.

The Chinese had expressed the same idea: "A journey of a thousand li begins with the first step."

It teaches us a lesson, not to despise small things. What Shakespeare’s Hamlet calls "enterprises of great pith and moment" were once small.

I have known an American Jesuit lay brother who had worked as a mechanic for Juan Trippe when Trippe was just beginning to build up his airline. They had only one small plane flying to the Caribbean. It grew into the vast Pan American Airlines with fleets of large planes flying to almost every part of the world.

There is a further lesson. We should heed the Latin warning: Obsta principiis. (Resist beginnings.) A small anomaly seems harmless, but it could grow into an enormous problem beyond possibility of solution.

That is a lesson one could learn from straddling the lordly Hudson.