CAMPSITE REVERIE

For the amount of alcohol they drank that first night, they didn’t make much sound. Tolerance is an amazing thing. However, I couldn’t quite get my mind around my fellow travelers wanting to forget this trip in a wallow of booze. I imagined them climbing out of the river at our take-out point at Pittsburgh Landing and laughing. Turning to me, Stretch might say, “What did we just do? Do you remember anything?”

“You didn’t miss much,” I’d say with a wry smile.

We had rafted about thirty miles downstream after the put-in, seen some baby rapids. I woke up to the sound of bacon crackling and the smell of freshly ground coffee. There is nothing quite like sipping coffee on the bank of a river, deep in the canyon, the cliff walls six hundred to a thousand feet above your head on both sides. You feel like you’re a part of it. The sleep in the tent had been peaceful, and breakfast tasted exquisite.

I sat in a folding chair beside the smoldering remains of a fire. Stretch’s crew had constructed it in the midst of last night’s silent reverie. I don’t know, maybe I had just been too tired to hear anything after the first day’s rowing; my city-boy muscles ached with the pain of oaring against nature’s flows.

I took a few more bites of my bagel. There was a rustle in the trees behind me, and through the brush came a deer. I couldn’t figure out where it had come from, because the bank we were on consisted of some sand, a few trees, and then cliffs rising almost as steeply as the towering walls of a Gothic cathedral. Out it came, straight through the campsite unafraid to the river. It was one of those pure moments, when time stops, the curtain parts just a little, and you can see the glory. This deer leaned its long, graceful neck into the frigid water for a few gulps of the blood of Idaho. When it righted its head, the golden brown of its dry fur had turned a sopping black. It turned, sniffing the air, then walked back through the camp into the brush and proceeded to climb at lateral angles. It zigzagged its way up over an outcropping, then disappeared. Where I lived in Tennessee, deer don’t do that. And neither does Satan.

My late-rising uncle came into the clearing.

“Man, you missed it,” was all I said.