LETTERS FROM HOME: SWEPT AWAY BY THE MYSTERIES OF RIVERS, THUNDER

July 7, 2000

Dear Julie,

Since I don't fish, I have found other things to do at DC's parents' cabin on the Castor River. I read, I sleep, I swim a bit and drive the 40 miles to a town called Piedmont to play golf.

The Canyon Club is a green nine-hole course surrounded by hills that some people in the 1970s claimed were swarming with UFOs. The St. Francis River cuts by Piedmont, murky and brown-green, a river that formed nearby Lake Wappapello. I arrived at the first tee at the same time as a man named Jack, a retired engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers.

It was a good job, Jack said, but not particularly remunerative, transforming river into lake. He was playing an old set of clubs that didn't offer the technological advantages newer ones do, but I don't think remuneration had anything to do with it. Each person I meet on the golf course has a highly individual approach to playing. Jack took three miniature slow-motion practice swings before each shot, as if deliberately calculating the angle and energy required to propel his ball in a 90-degree direction. He knew how. I'm sure he still knows the art of using a slide rule, too.

As I returned from playing golf, DC and the dogs were accompanying her father down to the river for some fishing. I tarried, talking to her mother, sipping iced tea, not wanting to go watch people fish.

Thunderclouds were coming from the west. Thunder rolling through these hills makes a sound I have heard nowhere else, a lazy rumbling that always seems more reassuring than threatening. The sound seems to resonate within like a mantra, a magnificent Om for all from the sky.

When I eventually walked down to the river, no one could be seen on the branch so I started walking upriver, where DC's father usually likes to fish. The river changes every time I'm there, or rather the river changes itself by altering its environment.

High water had swept away some of the log jams caused by previous rampages, and the banks were strewn with washed up branches.

How good to be like a river, both changer and changed.

At the top of river branch I was still alone. The river is wide and shallow and sunny there, the bottom magnified as light plays on the rocks.

I began swimming down the main channel as darker clouds moved in and a fresh wind made thousands of little footprints across the water.

DC later told me orange trumpet flowers were eddying in the current where they fished below the cliff on the lower part of the branch. She said Paul, her brother, was so awed by the thunder reverberating through the trees and across the surface that he couldn't speak.

Her father caught a 26-inch catfish. They also discovered a small water snake in their johnboat. DC's father didn't mind. DC and the dogs evacuated the premises.

At the bottom of the branch, I saw the water had almost swept away the gravel bar next to the hole where we usually swim and wash our hair. That bar has been there as long as anyone remembers.

When DC and her two sisters were in high school, they were skinny-dipping at the gravel bar one day when teen-aged boys in a canoe suddenly appeared from the main channel.

Who can say whether the girls or the boys remember that day on the river with more delight.

Love, Sam