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Show RIVER much always know where you are. It is difficult to get lost: after all, the river only goes one way. Our first days on the river are burned into my memory in the bright and fiery colors that soon began to appear in the autumn woods. Before long we settled into a routine. Vince and Diane built a shelter on the foredeck out of 2x2s and plastic sheeting. Rosie and I slept in the back of cabin, but we had to share our quarters with Rick, who bedded down on the floor of the galley that we built in the front quarter of the shelter. In the morning one of the couples or Eric would take off to shuttle Prometheus to a rendezvous, while the rest of the crew would take the raft downriver. The others didn't mind driving, so Rosie and I managed to spend most of our time on the raft. Rick rigged up some wires and pulleys that let us steer from the roof of the cabin, making the little work we had to do even easier. Once or twice a day we'd have to wrestle gasoline out of the fifty gallon drum and into the outboard tank that we kept on the poop deck, but otherwise we pretty much just drifted along, watching for stump fields, sawyers, and towboats. Towboats made the channel dangerous for small craft-especially slow small craft. The channel generally follows the main flow of the current and since it was autumn, the river was low and the channel was often the only safe water due to sawyers, stumps, and wing dams, so despite the danger we usually stayed between the red and black buoys that marked the channel. Sometimes we'd drop into a chute, a narrow passage between two islands, and leave the larger river behind. In these quiet places we could imagine what the river had been like before the coming of the white man. -67- |