the riverbank

The riverbank is the liminal space where Guy Montag, after his harrowing escape across the river, first sets foot on the land that will become his new world. It is the point of arrival after a journey that has stripped him of his old identity as a fireman and left him physically and spiritually exhausted. When his heel bumps land, touching pebbles, rocks, and sand, the river has moved him toward shore, and he hesitates to leave the comforting flow of the water, expecting the Hound to be there. But there is only the normal autumn wind, and the dry smell of hay blowing from some distant field puts him on the land. He steps from the river, and the land rushes at him like a tidal wave, crushing him with darkness and the million odours on a wind that ices his body. He falls back under the breaking curve of darkness and sound and smell, his ears roaring, and he wants to plunge back into the river. This dark land rising is like that day in his childhood when the largest wave in the history of remembering slammed him down in salt mud and green darkness. Too much land! But he stands, breathing, and the more he breathes the land in, the more he is filled up with all the details of the land. He is not empty. There is more than enough here to fill him. There will always be more than enough. He walks in the shallow tide of leaves, stumbling, and in the middle of the strangeness, a familiarity: his foot hits something that rings dully—the railroad track, the path to wherever he is going. Here is the single familiar thing, the magic charm he might need a little while, to touch, to feel beneath his feet, as he moves on into the bramble bushes and the lakes of smelling and feeling and touching, among the whispers and the blowing down of leaves. He walks on the track, and he is surprised to learn how certain he suddenly is of a single fact he cannot prove: once, long ago, Clarisse had walked here, where he is walking now. Half an hour later, cold and moving carefully on the tracks, he sees the fire ahead—not burning, but warming—and he approaches the campfire where Granger and the book people sit. The riverbank is thus the site of Montag's rebirth, the place where he leaves behind the city's unreality and steps into a reality that is new and strange, but full of the possibility of life and memory.