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Show RIVER III. RIVER FEVER Was I crazy? It would be easy to answer, "You bet," but that is too easy and only partly true. Looking back, perhaps I wasn't really crazy, I was mostly just young and excitable and naive. At the time I thought I was crazy and knew I'd done a lot of crazy things, but the times themselves were insane. I could say I was the victim of my youth and my times, but this doesn't help account for my odd-ball odyssey. What got me-trj wlieWfinto that rowboat on the Mississippi River? Let me begin at the beginning. As a child I lived next to a dense Utah white-oak woods that grew around the East Mill Creek as it tumbled out of the mountains that surround the Salt Lake Valley. The creek (pronounced "crick" by my Mormon kin) was named by pioneers who built a water-powered gristmill to grind corn and wheat on the banks of that rocky trace of water. My best friend, Butch, lived on the creek where it pooled up behind an irrigation dam that had a wonderful twenty-foot waterfall. Butch had been hit by one of the polio epidemics that raged in the early fifties, but he still managed to get around pretty well. In the summertime we'd fish the pond and float logs over the falls. For a mile or two above Butch's house there was a scrub oak woods, an ancient flooded bungalow, immense patches of poison ivy, the ruins of the mill wheel, and another irrigation dam built of great old timbers where the water pooled deeper than the pond in front of Butch's house, creating the finest place to swim in the creek despite the legend that it was filled with polio. The creek had cut a deep canyon into the Rocky -39- |