Down the River

 I have been reading the book Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness by Edward Abbey. He writes about a trip with a friend down the Colorado River through the Glen Canyon. It reminds me of the trip I took with my son, John down the Allagash River just about this time of year a few years ago. The trip of a lifetime.

"We are indeed enjoying a very intimate relation with the river: only a layer of fabric between our bodies and the water. I let my arm dangle over the side and trail my hand in the flow. Something dreamlike and remembered, that sensation called deja vu--when was I here before? A moment groping back through the maze, following the thread of a unique emotion, and then I discover the beginning. I am fulfilling at last a dream of childhood and one as powerful as the erotic dreams of adolescence--floating down the river. Mark Twain, Major Powell, every man that has ever put forth on flowing water knows what I mean."

 "At four or five miles per hour--much too fast--we glide on through the golden light, the heat, the crystalline quiet. At times almost beneath us, the river stirs with sudden odd uproars as the silty bed below alters in its conformations. Then comfortably readjusted, the river flows on and the only noise, aside from that of scattered birds, is the ripple of the water, the gurgling eddies off the sandpits, the sound of Newcomb puffing on his old pipe."