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Show RFVER That summer I worked at a Boys' Club camp in the San Bernardino Mountains to raise money for the trip. It was a very good job. I ran a crafts shop where we made plaster-of-paris castings and wooden tomahawks for black and Chicano kids from Watts, El Monte, and Pasadena. The job rarely lacked excitement. We watched the moon landing in the mess hall on a television imported for the big event. At the very moment that Neal Armstrong chose to make his great leap for all mankind, a young black cyclone named Jimmy tackled a mess boy and scattered bowls of custard from one end of the hall to the other. Vince also got a job at the camp and Rosie found work nearby. We dreamed about the river trip all summer. I designed a raft and built a model out of balsa wood and beer cans. Mississippi fever must have been catching, because the camp maintenance man, a seventeen year old named Rick, signed up for the trip. Rick was a tall skinny kid, blonde and rangy. He always wore levis and a battered levi jacket and wore thick, black horn-rimmed glasses that made him look like Clark Kent. Rick was two years younger than the rest of us, which at the time seemed like a big deal. Or maybe it was just that Rick acted more like he was twelve or fourteen. I had to give him a lot of credit for his technical competence-he knew more about tools and machines than the rest of us put together-but even at the start of the trip we weren't what you'd call friends. This didn't bother me. I thought that the raw adventure, the simple damn daring of the trip, would submerge any personal differences that might arise. As I said, I was naive. When camp ended, the director gave us some left over camping food (I especially remember one hundred bags of dehydrated scrambled egg mix) and an old outboard motor. We were on our way. -50- |