Deliverance

Lew and I started the canoe off the rocks with one three-armed shove, and I climbed back in with Drew. We entered a long straight stretch, moving with the fresh sweat that had sprung up from the beer as much as with the current.

The land on both sides climbed, and the river pulled us steadily toward a silver highway bridge. We went under, and the bridge clattered its boards as a pickup truck went over.

We were civilized again. On the right bank some tin sheds backed down to the water; the mud was covered with rusted pieces of metal, engine parts and the blue and green blinks of broken bottles. But there was something worse than any of this; some of the color was not only color; it was bright, unchangeable. Drew had been hit the same way, for another reason. “Plastic,” he said. “Doesn’t decompose.”

“Does that mean you can’t get rid of it,” I said, “at all?”

“Doesn’t go back to its elements,” he said, as though that were all right.

In the dark light the broken plastic pitchers shot out their rays like batteries. One was orange, one was yellow, and a water container was blue; what Martha, referring to clothes, would have called electric blue. The plastic throwaways were invulnerable in their colors, amongst the split, splintering boards and the brown-gold tin cans in the mud flats under the town, their lids prised-up and cruel, but going back to the earth.

The sky was begi

I pulled my paddle out of the water; a white feather was stuck to the end of it. I shook it off and peered into the river. Off to the right and getting ready to go by under water was a vague choked whiteness. It was a log completely covered with chicken feathers, with all the feather-hairs weaving and wavering in a perfect physical representation of nausea. When you are sick enough, I said truly to myself, that is the thing you feel.

“There must be a poultry processing plant in this town,” Drew half turned and said.

“Sure.”

The river was feathering itself night and day. The rocks were full of feathers, drift on drift; even the downriver sides were streaming and ba

On a patchy flow of feathers we went down, over the unplucked rocks and logs in the deep, slow water, and I was resigned to going along that way for a while until I noticed, for no particular reason, that the depth of my ears was increasing in some way. I concentrated, and the sound of water both deepened and went up a tone. There was another bend ahead, and the river seemed to strain to get there, and we with it.

Around the turn it came into view, and broadened in white. Everywhere we were going was filled with spring-bubblings, with lively rufflings, not dangerous-looking but sprightly and vivid. There was not the sensation of the water’s raging, but rather that of its alertness and resourcefulness as it split apart at rocks, frothed lightly, corkscrewed, fluted, fell, recovered, jostled into helmet-shapes over smoothed stones, and then ran out of sight down long garden staircase steps around another turn.

I looked for a way through. Drew pointed straight ahead, and it was better done that way than saying it. I sank the paddle into the river. The main current V’d ahead of us, and looked to be straight, as far as I could tell, though the V that indicated the fastest water disappeared about halfway along down the rapids.

“Call the rocks,” I hollered. “We want to go straight down the middle.”

“Ay, ay,” Drew said. “Let’s go there.”

We headed into the waist of the V. The canoe shifted gears underneath, and the water began to throw us. We rode into the fu

I yelled to Drew to keep his paddle on one side or the other. He chose the right—the biggest rocks seemed to be there; they kept looming up, through the water and just under it—while I alternated between sweeping us forward, adding to our speed wherever I could, and pulling backward on the river whenever we got too close to the rocks on the right. Already it was begi

Now I could look on past Drew and see the white water lapse and riffle out into green and dark. There was a short flourish of nervous rippling that took us between two black boulders, and we were through.

Drew hiked up his hand on the gunwale of the canoe and looked back, with a surprised pleasure.

“Old Lewis,” he said. “He knows something.”

I looked for the other canoe, which was not far ahead of us. Bobby and Lewis were plowing away at water that looked curiously dead, after the rapids.

But it was evening water. There was no sun on it, and the light that made the reflections was going fast. Far off ahead was the pouring of another set of rapids or falls with—I was already ready to bet—a curve in it.

I was awfully tired, though not sore. As the sun lost energy, so did I, and the edge of night-cold clinched it. I wanted to let go of the river.

We drifted slowly. The current entered my muscles and body as though I were carrying it; it came up through the paddle. I fished up a couple of beers from our pack and opened them and passed one to Drew. He twisted back and took it, one lens of his glasses dark with the sunset.

“It’s a hard life with us pioneers,” he said, and whistled a line from “In My Birch-Bark Canoe.”

I lifted my beer and drank, keeping the beer coming in as fast as I could get it down. The nylon of my legs was drying out and clinging to my calves and shins. I pulled the cloth legs loose from me and took up the paddle again. I felt marvelous.

We were about even with the other canoe. Like that we went down more drifting than paddling, into the dark coming upriver to meet us. There were no rapids—though we kept hearing them—and we were riding through rocky banks and tall mournful long-leaf pines. Once a little road, overgrown with weeds and bushes, ran along the left bank for a few hundred yards and then gave out at a fallen tree. A hawk circled in the dying blue, the trailing edge of his wings standing out sharply in the deep intensification of the evening sky.