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Friday, August 9--

8:45 a.m.-

The bump on the hull was minor. But nothing should bump the hull without the motor being bumped too. Chelsea felt it too and turned toward me with a quizzical squint in her eyes. I slowed into a sharp turn, noting the spot on the water where we'd felt the nudge. Nothing was there. Nor did our wake ripples indicate an obstruction.

I drifted the boat toward the spot. (Looking down at a river's surface is a strange sensation; relative movement to it is negligible, a feeling of being stopped, which we were, in relation to the current, but moving at 2-3 miles-per-hour relative to shore, or anything else not moving along the river bottom.) A dim hulk loomed then disappeared under the boat and bumped on its hull. We looked down the other side and watched the muddy twelve-inch diameter log move away.

Two or three hundred pounds of dead weight lurking just below the river's surface, pointing downriver like a weather vane, with a flat sawn end and eight feet long, the length cordwood is cut. In the river for decades, it had recently dislodged and drifted, was drifting, dragging its rear end along the sandy muck bottom by inches, or maybe meters, each day.

The river, due to tannic acid (a natural colorant from tamaracks and other swamp trees) and sediment, is murky. Visibility is no more than a few inches and in deep water there is a sense of looking into a dark secret.

The log bobbed ponderously as we drifted back downriver and produced obscurant ruffles on the water.

I wanted the damn thing gone, out of harm's way, not because of where it was then but where it might be later. A hell of a shock to the motor and transom if I hit it going fast.

8:48-

"Looks like a bear scratched it," Chelsea said, leaning over the gunwale, grabbing at the slime-slippery trunk. I'd tried it a minute earlier, with her running the motor, but she had trouble with the gas and gave it a blast and the boat lunged and I lost my grip. So we traded places (my good excuse to avoid having to touch the beastly dinosaur probably covered with amphibious spiders and blood-sucking leeches and finger-decapitating beetles. EZ was called to the rear where she expected attention and gazed into my eyes while Chelsea battled with the insolent weight.

"Those are propeller tracks," I presumed to Chels. "Someone negotiating the river gouged fresh grooves into the tip."

Slick skin. No purchase.

I wrapped the bowline with a slipknot around it. Chelsea held on and we and dragged the log backward into the shallows, where it can be watched every trip up and down to make sure it's still there.

9:45-

Bare feet buried in chilly custardy spring water under the white pine at the Sandbanks. Chelsea's big toe pops out of the rust colored goop, then mine rears up too, then disappears back down into the cool. We are standing face-to-face, eighteen inches apart, and giggling at the sight of such fun. The play and the childish delight two nearly grownup people are having because no one from rigor mortised society is present to reprimand two capricious spirits. Life is about the small stuff, which is actually bigger stuff than those important daytimer-tasks we frazzle ourselves to accomplish.

Chelsea's left toes waggle out of shallower sand by the shore. My left foot is encased in mud, between the toes too. Then a burble of gas bursts, then another, percolating like the La Brea tarpits as olden-days newsreels depict. Five toes peek out, then rise out of the slush, sliding back and forth, feeling-feeling-feeling the sensual slide of smooth cool clay and fart noises tickling the instep.

Grand Sandbanks is a high slope of mixed sand and clay, with a few widely spaced clumps of grasses to give it some grip. The angle of the bank leans geologically at 45 degrees, the scientifically approved natural balance of incline that unattached sand--or rocks, soil, or Hawaiian volcanic ash in other parts of the earth-- precariously clings to itself if no external forces, like dirt clumps or rocks thrown against it, act on it. If dirt clumps or rocks thrown against it act on it, it shudders, then drizzles some of itself downward in tiny avalanche rivers. Unless melon sized projectiles of rock, or very big dirt clumps, thud into it by the hand of a sensation-seeking daughter and release immediate torrents of dirt pounding downward carrying panicked scrambling ants and other bugs flailing who used to live inside the cryptic calm earth.

Violent big-fisted youth will slow down some day and learn to enjoy that life's small pebbles, tossed lightly at helpless other societies, can produce more introspective--though less ostentatious--superior shows.

The sandbank is dry from facing the sun, so each grain loosely slides with the others. Cascade grains mix with others the same size. Tiny currents nudge dark woody debris and pull along light hues and dusky, racing, slowing, stopping solid as equilibrium is reached. Flows freeze in new dappled order like God unexpectedly turned off the melody in musical chairs. Gray streaks and beige, and a face of a grinch locked in a tentative pose of a grouch.

"Wow," we utter together, lost in reverence at the unexpected wonder such a trivial amusement should provide.

"Thud!"

A bombshell explodes high near the lip. Daughter has graduated to more expressive ammunition. The slide starts small, a rock, a rodent, and a birch sapling or two. They gather momentum, pouring through households and burying insects out for a hike. Near the shoreline is a current-eroded lip. Beige sand flows down and over it and collects on wet sand, exactly like water falling over rocky ledges.

10:25-

Good God! How a baby who wailed about wet diapers and a hungry stomach can evolve into a real human girl, with wet rolled-up jean cuffs and fashionable cartoon shoelaces and feet in the river splashing warm water while flat on her back on the boat deck. Breasts blooming upward against gravity, toes pointed like a ballerina's, though she doesn't know that that's what she's doing. These two feet swinging high into the sun, to be stepped on by insolent boys and Internet men who don't care in a few years that she's spent this memorable morning on the river with her father. With EZ always watching, and--during exciting moments--dipping under water to pull up a charm.

We take a swim. Chelsea has on a modest two-piece suit, surprising to me, knowing her fascination with fashion, but appreciated too, this proper covering of herself. I know what an ingénue's cleavage and overexposed female skin does to boys of her age.

"What is it like to have boobs?" I ask. No better person to ask a long curious question from than one's daughter.

She gives me a blatant strange look and reaches for a towel.

"Do guys always look at them?"

"No."

"No?"

"Well, some guys, 'cuz they're pervs. But, and ... some guys even talk about them. Which is really annoying."

"'Nice tits,' or something like that?"

"No. Well, I don't know."

"I always wondered what it's like to be a girl, a woman with boobs. Guys always look at them."

"It depends on what size they are. If they're really big, then, guys always look at them."

"Guys don't look at your Mom much then, huh?"

"She's too old to look at."

10:40-

Strings of bubbles, also known as swamp gas, surge out of the soft river bottom where we are now beached at the campsite. No flying saucers or methane cute monsters rise up and shimmer in the bright light. This beach is in the lee of the bank and moves languidly past our naked feet and ankles.

Mica glitters too.

(It is December 10 as I review the videotape. The temperature outside is 23; we have had one nighttime low of minus 11 and daytime averages of 20. Without prompting or instructions on what she should do with it, Chelsea took up the camera while I sat on the shore oblivious to her filming. She waded and wandered and lay in the boat. I suddenly saw--tonight, watching the tape--what she saw. Through her eyes, what interested her, how she thought, aesthetics that drew her regard. I was suddenly brought inside her mind. Typical to her age--thumb ring close-up, then two other interesting rings, and ten red-painted toenails waggling in the sky. Sneakers raised over her head as she laid on her back, to film close-up the brand-new, multi-colored shoelaces she'd installed earlier while driving in the car. Cartoon characters with googly eyes printed on the fabric strips, "I love my new shoelaces," she says. "Rock on."

But more exclusive to individual disposition--nothing to do with her being a young teenaged girl--she spent contemplative minutes filming shadows and sun glints moving on ripples, sediment clouds flowing and sparkles winking against the lapping waterline.)

"It's looks like somebody came and dumped glitter there."

"It's Mica."

The image zooms closer. Pinpricks of sun startle.

"Glitter Beach," she says. That's now it will forever be called.

She focuses on smooth water dappling like quicksilver along the shore, shimmer sand throwing back molten sun. My feet tap absently in the water as though to a tune and my face, gazing down at the river, is alive with undulant water reflections.

Then a lone fur hair from EZ, floating above two-inch-deep water casting a string-of-pearls shadow against the bottom. (Here in December, a week before the end of Physics class, I still can't account for the physical properties making it happen. But we're only half through the textbook and chapter 34 explaining refraction looks unlikely to be breached.) The hair is fine, almost invisible, but the shadow is large, like a string of pop beads with clearly defined segments. Maybe it's not a hair, but a meager tapeworm EZ passed five minutes earlier.

A water bug enters the arena, skating through on a shadow of round pontoon float feet.