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Show RIVER Mountain granite, and even on the hottest days of summer, the creek was cool and shady. I don't remember why, but one thick, lazy summer afternoon I resolved to build a raft and float it down the creek. With Butch's help, I nailed some boards together/n my backyard and christened the finished product The Queen of the A River. It couldn't have been very large because we dragged it down to the creek and we were no more than six or seven. When launched, the raft floated, but it sank directly when we stood on it: I began to have my first notion of flotation. We played with the raft for about an hour, renamed it Tom Dooley, and floated it down the creek. Tom Dooley, AKA The Queen of the River, did not survive her maiden voyage and was last seen plunging over the waterfall. So I caught river fever a long time ago, the way some of my friends mysteriously contracted polio or rheumatic fever from the whiskey-brown waters of the creek. It may be that I caught it from a book, for the first books I remember are two old copies of the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. They were printed in the twenties and were heavy with the dust and mystery of old books. Tom Sawyer bored me, even at the age of seven he seemed like a patent phony, but Huckleberry Finn was another story. My father read it aloud to my younger brother and me, and even as a child the book made the Mississippi a living thing. We could close our eyes and there would be the wide moving waters, the densely forested banks and towheads, and the great steamboats blazing upriver. Huckleberry Finn left me with a dark and vivid image of the river, incredibly exact though I'd never seen more flowing water than I could easily throw a stone across. The clarity of those images still strikes me as strange and wonderful. It was almost as if I saw the river more clearly -40- |