3:05 p.m.-
"How
about I stow-away in your boat?" she shouted after her red STOP
sign-on-a-pole halted us out on the highway, then sidled over to my open window
offering her plan of escape from today's unbroken blue, ninety-two degree heat.
A rainbow silk scarf, tied tight like chemotherapy victims wear, circumscribed
her skull. In her left ear she wore a bullet earphone attached to a CD player.
The rest of her shimmered in sweat-darkened T-shirt and nylon jogging togs,
with a reflectorized layer of orange and green highway department mesh covering
her upper self.
"Three
miles farther we'll be on the water. Jump in."
"Your
dog is excited." (EZ was whining and grinning, campaigning to get out of
her back and into the front.) "I taught my puppy to swim on Sunday. We'll
be going to the lake when I get off in another hour."
(I
didn't think until later to invite her to meet us at the landing. But she
probably had a boyfriend or a husband named Gor driving the bulldozer down deep
in the road construction trench.)
Men
and women started re-doing the highway in middle June, interrupting the tourist
flow of traffic by digging up fifty-foot sections--every-so-often--and
installing new white concrete culverts down in deep road construction holes. The
speed limit was reduced to 45, which is fine with me who's dragging the boat
trailer through up-heaving holes and pissing off other motorists (for going
forty) who blast past (even though it's all "NO PASSING" now) waving "fuck
you" fingers and reaching eighty before surpassing my front bumper.
3:45-
She
waved a kayak paddle and yelled from far off, "Dis whop mewterly sock?"
I
cut the motor and tried to discern what this young lady yelling at me upriver
was asking.
"How
far is the public access?"
"Just
around the next nine curves," I said after stopping to count. (Gave up
trying to answer by mileage or time. The current slows. The passage takes hours
without paddling, or hours with paddling, if she kept up the pace she was
paddling. Too many clarifying disclaimers and I didn't want the culpability.)
"I'm
leading a group of camp Jezebel kids. They're back a ways and the bus is
meeting us at four."
"There's
a shortcut you can take. It'll get you there in half the time," I offered.
She
nodded vacantly as one does when being teased by a leper.
"When
you get around the next right turn and two left turns--the second is a slow
meandering curve--you'll see a break in the bank on the left and a dead tree
leaning over looking like it's blocking the side channel. It's not. I go
through there all the time. Just stay to the left and you'll see the current
curve in there. That's where you should go."
"Well,
I'm not like, really in charge. Duke, he's like, the guide. I'm not insured to
make that decision."
I
assured her that it was a secret but useful route and the girl backed away.
A
half-mile--river mile--upstream EZ barked and started stepping-and-fetching and
sneezing in the bow at an erratic smattering of sideways canoes and splashing
canoe paddles showering close-enough other Jezebel campers through a wide spot
on the river. A pair of assiduously soaking wet boys in the lead was stroking
the river in synch, paddling in unison on the same side of the canoe, but they
kept pirouetting in slow circles and swearing viciously at each other when
their vessel kept rotating back into some bushes.
I
gave them a smile and a hearty thumbs up.
Another
four canoes glided around two others that had swamped. Two effeminate girls
wearing hatred on their faces, stood in thigh-deep water swinging wooden canoe
paddles at a boy named "CHAD!!" as a third girl wept openly trying to
stand on the mucky river bottom to drain the flooded canoe by its stern--"Je-Christ-Je-Christ-Je-Christ-Heather-what-Frickin'-Goddamn-shit-am-I-standing-in!?"
(Camp
Jezebel is a Christian summer camp so I was spared the full-bodied,
u-containing "F" word.)
More
aluminum canoes shuffled through. Campers in life preservers held onto paddles
with fingers circling their shafts and hands only twelve inches apart for
minimum leverage. I wondered if a canoe lesson had first been given, or at
least Duke performed a proper paddle grip demonstration before they all
departed the bridge. A canoe was mired in a marsh a hundred-yards deep into a
swamp, young girls fighting each other's backward and forward strokes as a
passenger young lady smoothed on fresh lipstick from her spot on the floor.
5:49-
Anchored
within sight of the bridge. Teenagers are hitting the water. Ten minutes ago we
were pushed up on shore at the campsite curve. EZ was practicing her claming
and I was telling you about the torn-up highway and a hot lady with a great
steamy smile. Heard a rumble like a truck passing over wash-boarded gravel.
Passed it off as that.
Spent
the morning working on the other book and fretted occasionally about EZ. She's
panting a lot, even during the cool of the morning. A week ago I was ready to
declare her in remission, or after all, she'd been just kidding about the
tumor. Quit giving her pain pills and she seemed better for it. Took her to the
Vet's for a weight check yesterday and she put on a show of frenzied grins for
the nurses. Weight: 69, just like a month ago.
Got
onto the river just after 3:30. Hurried up to Grand Sandbanks. Changed. Got
cooled, then coaxed EZ (who's learned to submerge her head for clams, blowing
bubbles while under water and snorting when she comes up) over for a
deep-scrubbing shampoo. Then I heard a faraway jet rumbling somewhere high up
out of sight through the trees and wondered if they were military maneuvers
preparing to teach lessons to Iraq or Bin Laden, poster-child conflicts I have
no way of knowing what's true about any of it and have come to suspect none of
it. It seems unreasonable to me
that a few tiny megalomaniac egos can let live-or-die most of the world's
population at the whim of their mood, and those of us who want nothing of
little men's hallowed schemes only want to live outside of political deviance
and do what makes sense.
You
too?
It
seems reasonable to me that one day, after this life, I will be able to live in
a life of my choosing, free of dictatorous men who pawn civilians and say it's
all for their own good. It'll be an existence where I won't have to doubt what's
true from a lie because liars won't be allowed there.
Then
thunder, and again thunder, and relevantly determined that it'd all been
thunder, despite The Weather Channel's promise that a thirty-percent change of
rain was "remotely possible," but only for the far northwest tip of
Wisconsin--a long way from where we are. I love that they were wrong and the
clouds moving in from the west are growing more thrilling.