BY SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
sallies@juno.com

Of all the images I can summon of my month in Germany — cathedrals and churches, operas, fresh-planted gardens, outdoor markets — what do you think is the one that pops most often into my mind when I first wake up in the morning or begin wool-gathering during a boring meeting?

The river.

The Rhein. Or the Rhine, to use the English spelling. Father Rhine, it's been called. The Rhine is to Germany, indeed to all of western Europe, what the Mississippi is to the United States. Germany's earliest multi-lane transportation route, the Rhine and its tributaries did for early Europeans what rivers do everywhere: provide passage for the exchange of goods, people and ideas, cutting the way for roads and railroads built later in valleys smoothed flat or cut through mountains by the river itself.

Dave and I collect rivers, heads of rivers to be exact. We've waded in the birthplace of the Chattahoochee, the Mississippi and the Susquehanna, and photographed each other standing at the source of the Delaware, the Danube, the Missouri and the Neckar. We tried to do as much with the Rhine, on earlier trips, but identifying the Rhine's true source is problematic, composed as it is of literally hundreds of streams gushing from Swiss glaciers to converge in dozens of valleys and lakes before issuing from the Bodensee.

We did stand there, on a flag-lined bridge in Constance at the foot of the Bodensee, the young jade-colored river already in a rush beneath our feet toward the North Sea — which is, of course, downstream, but “up” on a map, a confusing reversal of our usual conception of rivers running north to south. Ironically, the Rhine itself never actually flows into the sea, but ends as it began, in a number of distributaries, chiefly the Waal and the Lek, that spread its waters through the lowlands to Europe's leading ocean port, Rotterdam.

I made my acquaintance with the lower Rhine at Cologne (to use the spelling English-speakers prefer for Germany's KÙln, a word that doesn't always make it into print correctly because of its pesky umlaut).

Cologne's rise to importance was due largely to the fact that it is at the intersection of the Rhine with early (and modern) trade routes from Paris to northern Germany. While visiting my daughter Mary in March, I found myself with lots and lots of time on my hands while she was at the theater, and I learned to know the city quite well, mostly on foot and mostly in very cold weather.

But time and time again, even though my initial destination had been the old city or the shopping district or a museum, I found myself drawn back to the river. Through the narrowest canyons of tiny 16th century buildings or down the wide modern boulevards that have replaced the old Roman walls, almost every time you look eastward, the river beckons.

Rivers are organic in every Webster sense of the word: having to do with a larger body, inherent, systematically interrelated, living things. They grow and change and their magnetism to human beings is such that there's always something happening on or around them. A major roadway runs through Cologne alongside the Rhine, but just before the street arrives at the heart of the old city-on-the-river, it is diverted underground and into other arteries, so that the space between the river and the old fish market area (now lined with pleasant restaurants and Biergartens) is all green and totally people-oriented.

Along the river itself is a wide, paved pedestrian zone, high enough to be clear of the rising water of most spring run-offs. That area is separated from automotive traffic by a wide strip of park. There are benches, flower beds, occasionally venders, sculptures, and always people: lovers with arms entwined, in-line skaters winding among the walkers, runners, cyclists, people walking dogs and people pushing prams, more and more of them young fathers, I'm pleased to mention.

And on the river, oh! on the river, the barges hauling raw materials upstream to German and Swiss cities and finished goods downstream, bound for the world. The river is mighty, very wide here, but nonetheless fast and powerful, and there is a marked difference in the speed of barges pushing upstream against the current or being pushed downstream by the current.

Especially on windy days, the blunt prows of these behemoths often breast water well over the bow. Some days it looked like a regatta of freight on the river, barges passing each other under the four great bridges that link Cologne with Deutz on the eastern bank, barges slowing to tie up for the night at riverside. This is the most concentrated commercial wealth on the continent, the Rhine literally throbbing as it turns inland cities into seaports for 800 kilometers (some 500 miles) from Basel, Switzerland to the ocean.

Come back next week and we'll leave the geography lesson for a long virtual walk up one side of the Rhine and down the other. “Virtual” may lack the color and sound of “real,” but I promise, you'll be a lot warmer this way.

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