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Show RIVER It was as if a fog shrouding my mind had lifted to reveal a sky brilliant with stars. I drove deeper into the heart of the night. Maybe it was seeing the wild river in Memphis, maybe it was just my own madness catching up with me, maybe it was simply that I was thinking clearly for the first time in months, but driving alone through the dark left me depressed. It seemed as if for the first time I could see the dimensions of what I was attempting and it scared me. "What are you doing, what the hell axe you doing, and what the hell are you doing it for?" The night air was cold and I could see that the earth was still locked in the grip of winter, dead and frozen. The river journey and the loneliness it entailed suddenly terrified me. Why did I want to spend the tail-end of winter in an open boat? As the truck careened north I couldn't come up with a single good answer. I had a desperate feeling, wishing I was somebody else with a different body and brain and past and an altogether different future: a Japanese autoworker, a Brazilian coffee farmer, an Italian truck driver, anybody but myself. I'd have been glad to trade identities and fates with any of them, just to acquire a different set of problems. As Scott Fitzgerald said, "On a dark night of the soul if s always four o'clock in the morning." Yeah, and about twenty degrees outside. I had a failure of courage and an uncharacteristic assault of common sense. While asking myself, "Why?" I got lost, taking a wrong turn toward Cairo. I beat the back roads until I found the highway to Paducah. Somehow, as we approached the Ohio, I pulled out of my nosedive and came to a sort of conclusion. There was no good reason to be doing what I was doing, but now that I was doing it, I was powerless to escape my chosen course. I'd made my bet and was going to have to stand behind it. This trip would kill or cure me, and I -142- |