THE same drifting log had caught up with our kayaks again. It was sometime during our third day on the Mississippi River, or was it the fourth day, or the second or fifth? I’d lost myself again in a silent reverie, allowing my kayak to spin lazily along the great river’s western shoreline, like a bright yellow leaf with some kind of exotic beetle in a life vest perched in the middle of it.
The current turned the bow first toward the unbroken line of trees and the muddy banks covered with mysterious animal tracks. Then to the downriver view, with my son’s kayak similarly gyrating a hundred yards ahead, beneath the limestone bluffs of the Missouri shore. Then across the nearly mile-wide glassy black river to the line of hazy sky and thin band of flat green on the far side that looked more like an Amazon shore than Illinois. Countless swallows dipped and dived. How much time had passed on this particular spiral drift? A half-hour? A million years? Who knew? Who cared? “Peace, like a river,” goes the old hymn.
