I am a piling. I hold up nothing. There was a pier here once and there is not one now, and I have been left in the water in the way that things are left in the water, which is to say without a decision having been made about it.

For most of this summer there was an inflatable dachshund lashed to me.

I want to be precise about this, because the fact will be reported inaccurately elsewhere. It did not wash up. It was not caught on me by the current. Someone brought it out here and tied it to me on purpose, with a rope, using a knot that held through two storms and the wake of every boat that came down past the bridge. Whoever did that is not known to me. They did it and they left and they did not come back, and the dog stayed, and it served no purpose whatsoever for eleven weeks.

I want to be equally precise that this is the most anyone has done for me in nine years.

In August a man came down to the water and picked up the rope. I assumed, as you would, that this was the end of it. He held it for a while. Then he put it down and left it tied.

The rope's name is Knot Sure. He is on the education beat at this paper and he will not discuss the piling under any circumstances, though he knows the ledge, and the ledge is me.

The dog is gone now.

I did not see it go and I will not speculate about the manner of its going. What I can report is that it is currently knocking on doors in Ward 11, that a contribution has been made in its name by General Lee, and that it has taken out an advertisement on page twelve of this newspaper. It is running for something. It has not said what. Nobody has asked it, which in this city is not an oversight but a courtesy.

I am aware of how this reads. An inflatable dog left a piling and immediately entered public life, and the piling stayed.

That is the arrangement, and I am not appealing it. I am fixed. That is the whole of my function and the reason this column can exist at all: everything that happens on this river happens past something, and I am the something. The dog moved and became a story. I did not move and became a vantage.

So this is what the column is. Once a month, what came down the river and what went back up it. What was tied to me and by whom. What the water did to the things people left in it, on the assumption that leaving a thing in the water is the same as being finished with it.

The river has no agreed name. I have checked. This is considered correct.

Next month: the wake, and who is liable for it.

On the Water appears monthly.