The River

Life is a river. It’s a lot of things to a lot of people. But in this particular writing it’s a river.

Rivers and I go way back. Not the Class 5 style river you find in Colorado, but the Class 1 or 2 style that lends itself to a good jumping rock, a rope swing, a lazy float trip, and watermelon cooled in the deepest hole. I have a distinct memory from underwater in Arkansas by a jumping rock where a rope swing dawdled in the current above my brothers and me as we pushed a watermelon back and forth through the crystal green water. It was slow motion, inverted catch.

I suddenly noticed a water snake weaving out from under the jumping rock about halfway between my oldest brother Pres and me. White bubbles shimmered to the surface between it and me as it swam toward the far bank. (Nothing moves like a snake, especially in water, and most especially when they are underwater.) I pushed the melon away from me, down and toward the snake’s undulating form with Pres floating suspended on the far side waiting to retrieve it. The melon arced under the snake, moving and floating lazily upward and toward my brother. The snake moved over it and past, flashing in the bent light from the river’s surface. It’s a Super 8 memory film that plays on demand for me. The colors are vivid. The snake’s movements are almost indescribable, and it’s probably bigger in my mind than it was in reality. My brothers and I are there in the water. And all the while, the river moved past.

That was when I was a kid, less than 10. Not long ago, I was on another river with several good friends. We had laughs on that river that made us incapable of doing anything else. Those are the health of life. Someone had hatched the idea of paddling up the Rio Grande in the Santa Elena Canyon for a six-hour out-and-back canoe expedition. What could go wrong? The going was not too tough but keeping the canoes straight proved to be challenging to us Austinites.

At one point we were paddling furiously up-stream against a small riffle and making very little headway. Our guide, a long-haired river yogi nick-named Smokey, watched us thrash as he effortlessly dipped his oar and moved up the riffle. He was solo in his canoe and standing in its direct middle. For those of you who don't know, this is a feat reserved for canoeing deities. Him smiling at us was the mildest, sweetest kind of getting made fun of that I have ever experienced. I captured video of the moment: a former UT football player and a very fit young doctor paddling like war gods as Smokey watches them go backward down the riffle. We have laughed at that like kids in church.

Once past the riffle, we continued our trek up the river to a landing spot whereupon we refueled ourselves with sandwiches while the bugs fueled themselves with us. And then we headed back down the Rio Grande for the remainder of the trip. The going down was considerably easier, and being fairly adept at navigating calmly flowing waters, my partner and I zigged and zagged from wall to wall going under and through rock formations. It is a dear memory.

Rio Grande, Santa Elena Canyon. Mexico is on the right. 

In the end all of us amigos ended up at the same sandy take-out spot, tired, wiser, more sunburned, and closer friends. And the river flowed past behind us as we cracked a cold one.

Life is a river. It never stops. Even in its calm expanses it is moving me and you and hundreds of millions more along. When we sleep, it moves tirelessly. When we wake, it is moving there, welcoming us to its waters. It is neither benevolent nor capricious. It just is. It flows whether we acknowledge its movement or not. It is like a harvest moon, shining equally on plentiful crops in good seasons and empty silos in bad ones.

I have been marking its passage lately with Xs on each day that goes by in my treatment. I mark through “AM” for morning chemo and walk. I mark through “IMRT” for mid-day radiation. I mark through “PM” for evening chemo and walk. And then I mark the whole day off with a large X. After tomorrow, Friday, October 10, I will be halfway through the treatments. What I recently realized is that no matter whether I do any of the steps in my treatment or mark any of them off as complete, the days turn over. The river moves.

While lying on my back today with acupuncture pins in my feet, hands, arms, face, and ears, I thought back on river times with my family: perfect rope swings with dear friends, phantom snakes on the bank, catching craw daddies (a.k.a. catching “daddy-head wobsters” to Ben), skipping stones, building river-rock dams in Crested Butte’s frigid Coal Creek, diving in deep blue water from our friends’ ranch springs…. And always the river is flowing.

This is not a sad thing; but it is something to note. The river moves. It does not wait. It does not return. It is up to us how we zig and zag, or if we do at all. It is our decision to smile with excitement or grimace with fear, either way we are in the river with that snake, and we’re all going through that riffle.