The River

And it was books he took solace in. When he wasn’t out on the ranch, or riding the lease, or fishing. He eschewed team sports—he felt like they were a bunch of kids showing off—and he kept most of his reading to himself. Not even his English teachers knew the depths of his growing erudition, but the school librarian did, as did Annie Bosworth down at the Granby Public Library. They knew. They also knew his instinctive modesty and shyness, so they encouraged him with guidance but never made a big deal of his extraordinary voracity, nor of his range. They simply kept him in books.

    He and Wynn had that in common, a literary way of looking at the world. Or at least a love of books, poetry or fiction or expedition accounts. Wynn was a straight-up arts major who took a lot of courses in comparative literature, particularly French. Jack was engineering and supremely comfortable in the language of mathematics, but for the rest of his courses he took anything to do with poetry or novels, and he had especially adored American literature from the beginning. They had met even before the first day at school, on a freshman orientation trip, a four-day backpacking romp through the White Mountains. He and Wynn had rambled way out ahead of the group and talked nonstop, about canoes and rivers and climbing, but also about how Thoreau did his laundry across the pond at Emerson’s house and how Faulkner was such a terrible drunk and womanizer and whether “Spring and All” was as good and important as “The Waste Land.” Jack was startled. He’d never had conversations like this with another kid, and he’d never imagined anyone else his age would love to read as much as he did—especially a guy who seemed to be able to more than handle himself in the woods. They were best friends from that first day, and whatever else they were doing, they never went very long without trading books.

One thing they talked a lot about on that first hike was Louis L’Amour. Once they’d discovered they were both avid readers and had gotten over their shyness about it they began to reel off authors and books, what was good about them and bad, what they loved. It was a breathless conversation, and not only because they were hauling ass down the north side of Mount Madison. And then they were both relieved to find that the other was not at all a literary snob. The classics and the canon were one kind of animal, but sometimes a trashy yarn that ran headlong with no pretensions was just as good. Or at least as fun. And so they could admit that they’d both read probably every Louis L’Amour pulp western extant, even the ones that mysteriously appeared years after he died. Wynn read them because the aspen forests, the sage meadows, the sandrock canyons of the West were as exotic and enticing as anything he could imagine. And because the characters rode horseback through that landscape, and splashed across ice-rimed creeks, and pushed through herds of elk, and calmed their quivering horses when they picked up the scent of a lion or the blood trail of its kill. The heroes made camp in the ferns beside a stream spilling from snowcapped peaks and rubbed down their horses with halms of wheatgrass, and they kept their fires small and “smokeless” so they didn’t alert their enemies. Jack read them because everything in them was familiar but shiny-familiar, not quite like the life he knew but the way things ought to be. Especially the part about killing all the bad guys and getting the girl.

    They had been talking so much and hiking so fast and not even noticing the weight of their packs that they outstripped the group by a few miles. When they got to a stream they unbuckled the waist belts and slipped the backpacks off their shoulders and leaned them against the hemlocks. Wynn had a filter bottle so they filled it in the cold brook and drank and filled it again. “Look,” said Wynn, “this is kinda refreshing.” He reached down to the base of a balsam fir where the cloverlike wood sorrel was covering the roots. He pulled up a handful and handed half to Jack and crumpled the bunch into his mouth. And puckered. Jack hesitated, then followed.

    “Sour,” he said.

“Kinda thirst-quenching.”

“I guess.”

They sat on a mossy boulder overlooking a low falls that spilled into a black pool infused with bubbles. Jack had never been in the mixed hardwoods of the East, but though they were alien, they felt comfortable to him, too. The rhythm of the ridges and streams was different, softer, less relief in the ups and downs, no rimrock, and more sheltered, too—the dense woods covered the valleys and went nearly to the tops of the mountains—but once he got used to the cadence, he liked it. A little claustrophobic, but he’d get used to it.

“Brookies in there, huh?” Jack said.

“If we had a bare hook we could probably catch them with a piece of our shirt. That plaid one of yours.”

Jack laughed. “Hey, use your own goddamn shirt.” He opened a Ziploc of nuts and raisins and M&Ms and handed it to Wynn, who said, “I hate people who eat all the M&Ms.”

“That’s what you wanna do, be my guest.” They looked at each other and laughed.

    And so they discovered that they were both fishermen, too. Check, check. They decided to make a small fire and boil water for tea. Why not? When the rest of the little group showed up they were stretched out by embers, sipping hot Lipton’s from plastic cups. The trip leader, a junior, just shook his head. They got a reputation after that.



* * *





Now as they zipped their lifejackets and slid the canoe into the water and hopped in; as they paddled for the middle of the cove, which narrowed toward the north and began to show current and funneled into a wide V that picked up speed and slipped down between banks of spruce; and as they looked ahead and saw the horizon line of the first rapid and dug in and paddled hard for the right bank—as they truly began to run the river, they didn’t think about anything but making it into the wide eddy pool along the right shore so they could scout the falls. But every river story they had ever read was just beneath the surface of their imaginations and must have fired them with extra energy and braced them, too, because at least half of those stories did not have happy endings.





CHAPTER FOUR


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