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Show RIVER great comfort in this. The dread disappeared and a sense of peace and composure seemed to flow through my weary sinews. Everything seemed all right. Revelations rushed through my head like dawn coming up over a mountain. "Twenty more minutes and I'll probably know what if s like to be dead," I thought. The thought of dying held no more terror, I was placid and mildly curious. It felt as if I'd come to an edge or a gate or a wall and with time I'd cross or merge or melt into something that felt like warmth: when I closed my eyes I could see light. All that was important now was to resist, to stay alive as long as I could. I set to work again at getting my boots off and it occurred to me that I was either going to wind up naked and alive on the Mississippi shore or clothed and dead in the Mississippi River, but it no longer seemed to matter. Not only was I detached and serene, I was getting positively euphoric. I floated for a while, trying to get more air. After resting I tried to catch sight of the shore, but saw only waterscape. I could have been in the middle of the Atlantic for all the land I could see, but a great dark object suddenly came into my line of vision. The towboat was backing water and launching a skiff. I was saved. The tow had launched its lifeboat, a skiff that was now rocking with the swells next to the gangway. In the stern of the launch a deckhand was pulled at the starter cord of an outboard motor. It seemed to take ten minutes to start the engine, as if the man was endlessly pulling the cord, and it appeared it might yet be my fate to drown because an internal combustion engine refused to start. My sense of time was completely gone: it actually only took a few pulls to start the engine, and though I thought I'd been in the water not much more than five minutes, I later learned it had taken twenty minutes to launch the skiff. -209- |