Питер Геллер - The River

They had been talking so much and hiking so fast and not even noticing the weight of their packs that they outstripped the group by a few miles. When they got to a stream they unbuckled the waist belts and slipped the backpacks off their shoulders and leaned them against the hemlocks. Wynn had a filter bottle so they filled it in the cold brook and drank and filled it again. “Look,” said Wynn, “this is kinda refreshing.” He reached down to the base of a balsam fir where the cloverlike wood sorrel was covering the roots. He pulled up a handful and handed half to Jack and crumpled the bunch into his mouth. And puckered. Jack hesitated, then followed.

“Sour,” he said.

“Kinda thirst-quenching.”

“I guess.”

They sat on a mossy boulder overlooking a low falls that spilled into a black pool infused with bubbles. Jack had never been in the mixed hardwoods of the East, but though they were alien, they felt comfortable to him, too. The rhythm of the ridges and streams was different, softer, less relief in the ups and downs, no rimrock, and more sheltered, too—the dense woods covered the valleys and went nearly to the tops of the mountains—but once he got used to the cadence, he liked it. A little claustrophobic, but he’d get used to it.

“Brookies in there, huh?” Jack said.

“If we had a bare hook we could probably catch them with a piece of our shirt. That plaid one of yours.”

Jack laughed. “Hey, use your own goddamn shirt.” He opened a Ziploc of nuts and raisins and M&Ms and handed it to Wynn, who said, “I hate people who eat all the M&Ms.”

“That’s what you wanna do, be my guest.” They looked at each other and laughed.

And so they discovered that they were both fishermen, too. Check, check. They decided to make a small fire and boil water for tea. Why not? When the rest of the little group showed up they were stretched out by embers, sipping hot Lipton’s from plastic cups. The trip leader, a junior, just shook his head. They got a reputation after that.

Now as they zipped their lifejackets and slid the canoe into the water and hopped in; as they paddled for the middle of the cove, which narrowed toward the north and began to show current and funneled into a wide V that picked up speed and slipped down between banks of spruce; and as they looked ahead and saw the horizon line of the first rapid and dug in and paddled hard for the right bank—as they truly began to run the river, they didn’t think about anything but making it into the wide eddy pool along the right shore so they could scout the falls. But every river story they had ever read was just beneath the surface of their imaginations and must have fired them with extra energy and braced them, too, because at least half of those stories did not have happy endings.

They rode the ramp of current down into a rippling of low waves and then the current smoothed and they were between low banks of tamarack and pine, with the white trunks of birch staggered through like markers or signals of who knew what. A fallen half-submerged log lay off the right shore and its black head bobbed in and out of the current like the nodding dead. Jack looked away. They stayed on the right side of the river out of an abundance of caution. The river had been run many times and was well described, but it was not run every year and no one in Pickle Lake had heard of anyone running it this summer. A must-make portage was maybe the most critical expedient they had to deal with, that and running the rapids without mishap. Sometimes the landing spots were small and right above the lip of a falls. Rivers could change a lot year to year, did change, and so a fallen tree blocking the eddy to one of those mandatory take-outs, or the erosion of a cut bank that wiped away a landing beach, had to be assessed well beforehand if possible. If not, they had to be on their toes with an emergency backup plan. Once on a river in Maine it had involved Jack jumping into the water with the painter rope of the canoe and grabbing for a snag against the bank. To keep them from going over a falls. A last-ditch and dumb move they never wanted to repeat.

It was already afternoon. Ranks of high clouds had sailed in from the north and were scattering the sunlight on the woods and the water. A pair of green-winged teals turned fast over the river and dropped sharply to the current and drifted ahead of them for a while. They caught sight of the bald eagle or its mate double-pumping its huge wings to land in the top of a dead tree. Wynn noticed that the smells were different now—it smelled like a river, like moving water, a colder, cleaner scent, and he pulled it into his lungs, from where it seemed to run through every capillary of his body, and he felt happy. Lake paddling was one thing, but it was good to be on a stream. It had always been that way for him: he’d string his favorite four-weight fly rod and step into a brook and feel the current pressing his knees and the rhythms, even the natural laws, of pedestrian life were suspended and he felt immediately uplifted. It had been that way since he was a child. Jack felt the excitement, too. After his mother died on the Encampment, he made himself fish again, and swim in current. It was hard at first but he did it, and after a while he could separate the one river from all the rest.

They knew that the lip of the falls and the trail for the portage began just after the sweep of a wide right-hand bend and they paddled easily around it and saw easily the flat gravel beach and the dark opening of the trail through willows and they paddled across the gentle eddy pool which turned them upstream and they stroked right up onto smooth stones.

It was already afternoon but they could huck the portage and make more miles, but for some reason neither of them was ready to leave the lakes behind. They would make camp. They each lugged a personal blue barrel of camping gear and clothes and another of food and cooking stuff to a clearing on a rock bluff overlooking the drop. Four small barrels. There was an old log cabin there, very small, built probably for hunting by a Cree, someone who came in by a boat with a motor from the string of lakes. A good place to camp for a few weeks. Except for the noise. The rapid was so loud they almost had to shout to be heard.

“Yo!” Jack called over the roar of the falls. “Just hearing that sonofabitch makes me need to pee.” The thunder throbbed and thumped and if you listened closely you could parse out the rush of a ledge, the sluice beside it, and the crashing hydraulic beneath. A thousand violent sounds.

“Right?” Wynn said. “Wonder how we’ll sleep. I can feel it in the ground.”

“Fine, because we don’t have to try to run the damn thing.”

Maybe somebody could—run it. In a kayak. It was probably Class VI, a series of ledges with a massive amount of water pouring through. It looked like the North Sea in storm being spilled down a staircase. Maybe seventy feet top to bottom and ramped over an eighth of a mile. One rock island in the middle, the size of a rowboat, supported one gnarled and stunted spruce. The living fact of it trembling there in the middle of the mayhem only made the cataract more terrifying.

The sun broke through a reef of cloud and lit the falls, blazing the snowy whitewater and somehow sharpening the sounds, and Wynn thought it was beautiful, too. The way sheer rock ridges are beautiful, and avalanches.

There were blueberries. As the sunlight swept over the cabin it warmed the low groundcover around it and loosed the scent of the fruit and the tang of Labrador tea. The blueberries covered the clearing. And they were ripe. A fire might be coming and the frost might have landed early, but right now the country felt unbridled and wild, and bountiful, and mostly benign. The funk and low-grade fears of the morning had passed. They felt like themselves again.