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Show RIVER beach. I thought that if I heated the barrel, convection might pop it back into shape. I propped the barrel over the fire and sat thinking in the dark. I thought about all the hassles we were having and I began to worry that the raft would come undone and leave us high and dry. The fire burned under the barrel for a long time and it got plenty hot, but it maintained its crooked shape. At last the fast-rising river drowned the fire and I went back to sleep. The next day was one damn cliffhanger after another. The river had risen two or three feet during the night and now the swift, mean current was choked with the tree stumps and general junk which filled the river when it was rising. There wasn't much wind, but the day started out with a dismal drizzle falling from low-hanging clouds. The raft limped along like a crippled duck, water washing up over the bow. I figured that if we could get to Cairo we could buy a new drum-the old one was clearly beyond repair-and get the raft ship-shape again, but now it was easy to imagine the raft coming apart, disintegrating into the kind of floating garbage that littered the bank of the rising river. Vince was too laid up to help with the steering, and about noon Rick came up and told me he planned to leave when we got to Cairo. I almost told him that now that he'd wrecked the raft he might as well leave, but I just said, "Good." We tied up a couple of miles above Cairo and Rosie and I walked into town to buy a new barrel. We found one at Solomon's junkyard and one of the workers gave us a ride out to the end of the road where we started pushing the barrel down to the river. We met Vince, Julia, and Rick going into town, and they wouldn't help us push the barrel down to the raft. "It hardly seems worth the walk back," said Rick. This got me so pissed off I decided to remount the barrel by myself. -85- |