Outside our tiny apartment, the sun is inexorably browning our grass and boiling the asphalt. It's 105 dry degrees outside, and dusty—the combines are turning the fields back to dust in their metaphorical, cyclical patterns. Inside, the blinds are drawn and two fans are turning, somewhat lazily. It's cool and dark, and it smells like cool and dark in here.
In the kitchen a few minutes ago, my hands were wet from the juice of peaches I made for breakfast. So ripe their skins came off without a knife and so tasty I could eat a dozen all at once, I'm not sure that there's any food I like more in summer than peaches, eaten under a fan on days this hot, then burning my feet when I walk outside, barefoot, to get the mail or water my flowers.
In five days I'll be on a river, rafting 100 miles of pristine flyfishing and whitewater, the first vacation in eight months. We won't have iPods or anything electronic beyond, perhaps, a GPS unit if we go looking for some old gold mines—C has been poring over old maps to find some, but they're probably all blasted shut. No music unless C brings his guitar and then, maybe, some Bob Dylan or the Garth Brooks song he sang at H's and my wedding. But more likely than not, C and his girlfriend and H and I will sit in hot springs at night, staring up at the sky and watching stars fall across the canyon rim, out of sight. We'll get pruny but won't notice because it's oh-so-dark after the sun retreats. We'll go back to our sandbars and stretch out on top of our sleeping bags and continue watching the stars until, somehow, we wake up and it's morning and we're inside our sleeping bags and it's bloody cold and we argue about who has to go boil a bucket of river water and make coffee. While the others do dishes, I might walk upstream and drop my fly behind the big rock where I caught my first fish, ever, when I was 6. Later, we'll pack up and load up and strap on our bags and hit the water before the sun does.
I know the rapids: I know how to hit the slot in Tapan Falls, I know how to weave between the rocks at Sulfur Slide. I know where the large white rock is on the left side of the river that signals the silent Velvet Falls—people don't believe a falls can be silent until they've seen Velvet—I know the route through Haystack rapids, ever my nemesis since it a flash flood washed the old rocks and waves out and brought them in anew.
Moreover, I know that I can manipulate the river's power, not necessarily by brute force but by knowledge. Yet in the face of that knowledge, I understand implicitly that the river is stronger than I am, that if I am forgetful or foolish for a wrong moment, the river will take advantage of me. It's a tenuous relationship but I love it. Our use of each other brings mutual respect: The river teaches me its secrets (no, not all of them) and I, in turn, rally for it and its sisters when technology and the people who don't understand try to invade.
And when it's over and we're loading trailers and driving back up the dusty road and the river winds out of sight behind us, and we're brown and mosquito-bitten, I know that this is the best life is going to be. I know that I'm going to go back to a desk and put words in right orders and place periods and m-dashes in optimal spots for enhanced readability . . . but in other the cumulated 51 weeks of the year, I won't experience anything like that one week with water and rocks and stars, and streaking silver fish.