LETTERS FROM HOME: GOING OVERBOARD AT A CABIN ON THE CASTOR RIVER

Sept. 7, 2000

Dear Pat,

Our California niece Monica and her fianc Kevin joined us at the cabin on the Castor Labor Day weekend. He lives in San Diego, she is in Chicago getting a graduate degree in broadcast journalism. They are young and beautiful and shine with hope and promise. They can't know what is to come but are making plans to encounter it together.

They are city kids, eager to learn how to identify poison ivy and to watch DC's father clean a bass until he actually slices it open. Monica searches the cabin journal to relive her visit as a baby and finds another entry when she was an older kid who went hunting with the grownups but didn't "catch anything." That time she saw her grandfather dress a squirrel and immediately knew hunting wasn't her sport.

Two of the Neosho nieces, Devon and Darci, came with their mom for the weekend, too. Their older sister, Danica, is in college in Kansas City now and asserting her independence by deciding not to cross the state for Labor Day for once. Her sisters seemed a bit disoriented, their trio become a duo.

Traveling to the Midwest to meet the Missouri side of the family surely must have made Kevin somewhat anxious. We were a bit concerned ourselves. What if we didn't like Monica's intended? What if he were glib and insincere in the worst Southern California tradition?

After flying to California and marrying DC almost seven years ago, I learned her friends had devised a plan to kidnap her in case I was terribly Mr. Wrong. We had no such rescue plan in place.

But immediately we saw Kevin was a likable, normal, sports-loving and Monica-loving guy who couldn't hold back tears when he asked her parents for permission to marry their daughter.

Usually Labor Day weekends at the cabin are spent working and fishing, working and swimming, working and eating, working and sleeping, working and reading. But thanks to our special guests, this time most everybody just played.

Sunday we set off up the familiar branch of the Castor River in two johnboats and a canoe, bound for the open water of the main channel. As always, we encountered passages where the water is deeper and the boats float. But there are many half-submerged logs and parts where the river is shallow and the boats scrape the rocky bottom and must be pulled along. Doing this is much easier if the partners in the boat work together.

I love leaving the narrows of the shady branch and being enveloped by the openness and the sunlight of the main channel. There you can bask like a turtle, loll like an otter.

The canoe was our wedding gift from DC's siblings. We haven't used it much, mainly because every time we do I seem to end up in the river with a canoe for a hat. We have concluded that we do not canoe well together.

I think it's because DC and I both lived on our own for so long that partnership is still like a foreign language we are learning. Canoeing is a partnership. So is marriage.

Monica and Kevin are starting out together much earlier in their lives. Maybe partnership will come more easily to them without independence being so ingrained.

At the main channel, DC canoed solo and fished with dead minnows because she can't bear to stick a hook in live ones. Her parents escorted Monica and Kevin around the fishing holes. Monica caught a tree.

DC's brother Paul whirled fly casts so graceful he could have been in "A River Runs Through It."

Returning down the branch to the cabin was easier than going up. But nearing the tree where we tie up the boats, DC suddenly jumped out of the canoe, dumping me in the river.

In order to bask and loll in the sunshine of the main channel, I remind myself, you must first understand how to navigate the shallows.

Love, Sam