rivers: they just keep fucking flowing

I and others spent the weekend on a river. Our host, a fellow classy enough to qualify as a role model, had lost his wife to cancer a mere year earlier. He is an adroit fisherman, who knows the river well.
Remarking on the fact that the river was obscured by a few upstart bushes, though it was only a few yards from the meticulously screened porch we were reclining on, he said:
"I used to keep the river banks free of foliage so that my wife might see me catch a big one."

The north fork of the Shenandoah might boil away and it would not be that which is missing, but it is a very old river.