There is mystery to the way that the river bends out of sight to both the East and the West as I drive across the Hickman Bridge. Folks in Waterford call it the Waterford bridge, but they’re wrong. It is hard to tell where the river is coming from or where it is going to. I want to drive to the small public park on the East side of the bridge and walk down the dirt ramp into its coolness on hot summer days and drift headlong down through the clear slow parts with my eyes closed. I want to feel the cold water over my ears and hear nothing but its roiling in the algae shallows. I recall memories bygone of hunting wood ducks with my cousins on that river, I can still feel the wetness of cold, fog laden mornings in the dark, hoping I didn’t flip the kayak or lose my gun. It sounds simple until you’re on the water and you feel how slippery the blued steel is on the knees of neoprene waders, and you feel the delicate balance of sitting in a small watercraft as you drift silently through overgrown berry thickets. I remember one day years ago kayaking through a narrow portion of water where the volume of the river funneled through a quandary of overgrown blackberries. I felt the water pulling me through the narrowing faster than I wanted to go but to back paddle would only risk twisting the craft and dumping me and my gear into the eddies that swirled nearby around the corner. I ducked as best I could and felt the berry vines and the thorns thereon dragging over me as I looked up and beyond them. I felt a thorn dig into my scalp and rip my warm hat off. It dangled in the brush behind me. Maybe it’s still there today but with high waters later in the season, it was probably gone within weeks. The blood dried in my hair and we hunted along that river until dark. The following year, on Thanksgiving day, I flipped my kayak and felt my waders fill to the top. I retrieved my gear from the river bottom and paddled to the side to undress and shiver and wring my clothes. The river has a draw, we want to know if we can survive it. We make ourselves passengers to its eddies and bends, we make ourselves passengers to its rapids and calms.
