They shove off together barefoot with no plan, a couple fearless Huck Finns. New love is always built on the kind of trust you put in a boat that might not be a boat at all, and it feels silly to consider the details around what might be seaworthy versus what might sink. That is to say, one person’s hesitation over a craft’s “draft,” or how much water it displaces, is replaced by the other’s bravado. Anyway, failure is a stowaway no paying passenger wants to discuss topside, especially on a day like this, in this gentle breeze, under this July sun, with clusters of shoreline reeds bending in the steady push of the shallow current. Not that either of them are paying passengers, which is good, because it certainly isn’t a boat they’re on but more of a raft, something they’d stumbled upon stuck behind a log amongst the dirty foam detritus swirling in an eddy beneath the shade of a willow whose long spindly fingers dangle just low enough to cut little Vs into the slow moving water. But the water is indeed moving, and as long as the raft, really just a ten-foot section of an old dock dislodged by the last big storm, can support their weight, the river will carry them somewhere. And since anywhere is good enough for two people who just want to be together, buoyancy ranks high above trajectory.
She watches him struggle to free the cross-fastened planks from the snag, sunk to his thighs in muck. Watch out for nails, she thinks, as he pushes it out past the swirling eddy, where the current grabs hold and spins it longways, almost yanking it from his hands. He leaps aboard, splatting onto his stomach. Watch out for splinters, she thinks, as he picks up speed.
“It’s now or never, my dear!” He shouts.
She sloshes through the reedy shallows toward an ominous dropoff, a dividing line between who she is and what she might become. With everything she yearns to be, she plunges headlong into the seam. The fast, dark water has her now, and she swims along with ease. But the river has him as well, and at an equal pace. There’s a moment of panic, a brief pang of regret. She flips over on her back to rest, to count the clouds, to breathe. Her arms scribe lazy windmills, her legs languid, serpentine kicks. The sun is in her eyes, and the waves lap over her face. She hears his voice getting louder. She is getting closer. Finally, she feels his touch on her arm. She feels the slippery wood with her hand.
“Watch out for nails,” he says, helping her aboard.
The vessel accommodates two, no more, and rides just below the waterline. From a distance, they’d appear to have magical powers, and in a way, they do. It’s comforting to know your craft, even if capsized, can’t sink. Makes way for the kind of freedom two people can feel adrift on a raft, holding one another in the sunshine, moving quickly but turning slowly, like the hands of a clock that has lost track of time. Only their own voices interrupt the babble of a wide, wandering river, which, let’s face it, cannot really be interrupted at all.
They drift past a copse of cottonwoods standing together like a group of old friends whiling away the years, summers spent holding up the sky with their branches, winters spent letting it through. Talk about commitment. And if trees could dream, the two travellers agree they, the trees, would dream about mobility. Of course, rivers are a way of transporting felled timber, but what tree would ever choose to fall? A river, by contrast, never has to choose between moving through time or space because it is everywhere at once and, curiously, never the same place twice.
All afternoon, they lay under the sun, her arm dangling in the water as he runs his hands through her hair. They feel the power of the river beneath them, accelerating through the narrow parts and slowing down where it widens out. They hear the songs of redwing blackbirds, the croaking of bullfrogs, while easing past the broad green brush strokes of a cattail marsh. The sounds of life shout from every vibrant surface. Herons stand motionless near the shore, scanning the shallows for a meal. Hawks wheel above in great, wide, effortless circles. The sun slips below a firepink horizon, as the sounds of nature are handed off in an orchestrally precise way, rehearsed since time immemorial, from the diurnal music-makers to the nocturnal; crickets, summer cicadas, a cacophony of peeping tree frogs.
A huge, flat, yellow moon rises from the east, igniting a million breeze-freshened crests on the river’s surface, as if roughened by a skein of diamonds. By midnight, there are two moons, a wobbly one in the water, and a bright silver diadem hanging directly above, the light of which casts his fingers’ shadows across her pale skin. The silence of a kiss is broken by the splash of a nearby fish, an atmosphere-curious voyeur of the deep. A larger one jumps a moment later, just the other side of the raft. A carp, a salmon, a great blue whale. Mind your own business! she thinks, pulling him back to her.
The sun has been up at least an hour by the time he opens his eyes, and four deer stand at the water’s edge, lifting their heads to stare at the drifters. He thinks about waking her, but imagines her in a deep and wonderful dream, and saves the sighting for himself, a story to share later on.
There’s no telling how far they’ve travelled overnight, no recognisable landmarks. When she finally stirs with a yawn, their precise location never becomes a topic of conversation. They discuss books, instead. They talk about music. Each asks the other what they want to be when they grow up, without considering the likely possibility they are both already grown-ups. Neither volunteers a specific age, nor is a number asked of one by the other. Since the very idea of growing up is open for good-natured debate, and far more interesting than integers, they remain on the topic awhile.
Some hours into midday, they gather speed along a lively stretch that meanders through high, loamy banks littered with fallen trees and the exposed roots of giant pines struggling to win their silent battles against erosion. The escarpments tell a story of glacial gouging and violent scouring, an ancient path carved for the peaceful aquatic artery that now whisks them along like delectables atop a flat server’s tray through a fine restaurant. Being utterly rudderless and with no paddle or other means of basic directional control, they surrender themselves to the whimsical river. This somewhat unconscious, some might say unadvisable decision is what carries their raft, now moving at a considerable rate, toward the outside bank of a particularly sharp bend, or what seasoned river rats call a “sweeper,” where the vessel is pitched against the shoreline. It’s a smooth sort of landing, and fortuitous not only because his quick thinking, bravery and willingness to get wet prevents a collision with a downed tree spiked with broken branches, jutting out perpendicular to the flow of the current, or what canoers and kayakers refer to as a “widow-maker,” but because growing along this shady shoreline is a thicket of healthy, fully fruited raspberry bushes. Both passengers spend a few minutes stretching their legs and picking berries before he eases the raft beneath the spiny obstruction, downstream to a place they can both climb aboard and resume their journey.
Over the next few hours, they talk about places they’ve been and places they want to go. They talk about their favourite foods and famous people they’d like to eat dinner with. They take turns describing the scariest thing that’s ever happened to them. He asks her if she’s ever been in love, and she says you go first, and he says no, you go first and she says fine, I’ll go first. His favourite class in high school was biology, and her favourite class was ceramics because she liked the bumpy feel of wet clay spinning around in her hands until it all became smooth and turned into a bowl.
They notice how the water has changed from dark blue, back where it was slower and deeper, to a brighter blue-green where they are now, the shallowness accounting for the current’s acceleration and viridescence. For a long time, they don’t talk at all. Lying on their stomachs, they stare down, faces inches from the water, watching the multicoloured tapestry of river stones speed by like a beautifully graffitied freight train. The occasional trout zips from beneath the raft’s shadow, toward the protection of some rocks where they, the trout, are immediately concealed again by their own pebble-patterned camouflage. Submerged patches of bright green weeds undulate in great S shapes like long, festive, emerald-embroidered dresses in a windstorm. The passage of the stones and their vibrancy and spheroidal smoothness is mesmerising. Geologically hypnotic. The river’s power is immediate and cinematic in scale, yet the feeling of danger remains somehow anesthetically distant. Their hands dangle in the freezing water, the coldness of which is balanced out by the warm sun on their backs. The speed of their movement is cancelled away by the slowness of the day.
The passengers don’t recall how long they’ve been entranced by the motion of the rocks, the weeds, the fleeing trout, the silent language of thought. There are no rapids ahead of the falls to jostle them from their dreamlike states, no misty spray or ominous, thunderous warning sounds. There is only a brief slab of clean bedrock, slick as blacktop, beneath the raft, which is already pitching downward over the edge, separating itself from their two bodies, which themselves are separating from one another the way bodies in weightless, soundless space drift apart. She notices the beauty, the astonishing clearness of the water’s smooth green-blue curl coming off the slab’s sharp edge. He notices the unmeasurability of the water’s volume, and is shocked by his own lack of concern. She feels poured among diamonds. He shouts to her, but his voice makes no sound. The falling has moved his heart to his throat.
They splash down in a deep, frothy pool, missing all the rocks and avoiding collision with their raft. There’s a momentary spinning, a turbulent pressure holding them down in cold, dark discombobulation. But they quickly find themselves on the surface, saved by the current which ushers them gently away from the falls. Catching their breath, gagging on swallowed river water, they paddle toward one another, quite surprised to be alive.
She feels not betrayed by the river, but emergent and triumphant in some profoundly cosmological way, birthed and baptised in one elongated instant. She holds him tightly, kissing his neck and face. When he puts his arms around her, he sees blood sliding from his scraped arm into the water, a puffy red nimbus. They look back up at the falls to see a rainbow spanning a misty veil. It isn’t so high, after all. Maybe twenty feet. They share a shivering cold laugh. He tells her she has blue lips. She points out his goose bumps, then notices the blood on his arm. It’s nothing, he says. We’re alive. He kisses her blue lips, as the current speeds them along, bumping their toes against river stones and slippery logs.
They hold fast to one another, bobbing in the waves, each heart trying to pound its way into the other’s chest. Careening wildly, psychotically toward a mountainous set of rapids, they seem as inured to the danger as the moment they shoved off together, the day before. And what is there to fear anyway, given what they’ve just survived? What’s a few bruised arms and legs?
The thought of swimming for shore never enters their minds. A river’s pulse beats from the centre, and they’re doing just fine. And plus, swimming is a solo endeavour. Wherever the river flows, they will go together.
Throughout a brutal series of what experienced whitewater rafters refer to as “Class Six,” or “Extreme/Exploratory/Life-Threatening Rapids,” their faces are locked together in a tooth-chattering coldwater kiss. Air, when available, is aspirated nasally. They both know this can’t last forever, the whitewater spincycle, that is.
Thrust onto the peak of a massive wave, he breaks from the kiss momentarily to assess the situation and lets out a tremendous laugh, as they are sucked back down into the next roiling trough. There’s no time to tell her what he’s seen, and he wouldn’t if he could. He finds her cold lips with his. Their four legs, braided together tight as a lariat, bounce hard against a boulder, and the two are suddenly airborne again, this time shot into space like a cork from a well-shaken champagne bottle. He opens his eyes to take in the view. And what a view it is! The shroud of mist, the smell of water mixed with pine sap and sunshine. The ribbon of blue-green river below appears thin as a garden snake. He’s never seen full-grown trees appear so small, like the meticulously manicured landscape of a serious model train enthusiast.
A series of vignettes flash across the screen behind her own closed eyes. First, the memory of their first date, just a few days ago. The ice cream parlour downtown. He had chocolate chip, and she had butter pecan. Him splashing onto the raft yesterday, shouting it’s now or never! The two of them climbing some snowy mountain in Europe, maybe Nepal. Him down on one knee in a field of flowers opening a small box containing a diamond ring, a blazing salmon/pink/purple sunset in the background. The two of them in a hot air balloon, at a county fair, in a horse-drawn carriage, on a beach, in a snow cave, in a regular cave, dancing in formal clothes to classical music at a formal event, dancing in normal clothes to rock music. The two of them sitting in rocking chairs on the porch of a cabin at sunset with little kids running around, laughing.
She feels his heart pounding against hers. Their velocity makes the spray feel like needles against her skin, like what she imagines it might feel like on the back of his motorcycle, her arms wrapped around him, speeding through a summer rainstorm. She holds on tight, managing one last smell of his hair, as he squeezes her breath away. She tastes salt on his neck, his pulse thrumming like a hummingbird between her lips.
