Meridian, high zenith, tree shadows dark and downcast, burnished blue. Not a breath crackles, air like hot lead, only cicadas in their seventeenth year go whirring. There is a point before entering shadows when the light builds and blinds and glows hot, a retina burn, when the sun shines and ricochets off the surface and dashes vainly at the edges of shade. It creates a barrier between the clear and the obscure, a barrier of light. It becomes harder and harder to see and then for only a second, depending on the rate of travel, I feel blind. If I continue with some strange twist of faith I find the ground feels the same beneath my feet, I do not fall from the earth although I cannot see it. With another two steps the world becomes clear again, but shadowed, sheltered.

The riverbanks are draped in cottonwoods and maples and willows, thick with dark firs. Brambles stumble down the rocky cutbanks but in places the earth slopes gently into the muddy shallows. There are animal tracks, birds, beavers, raccoons, dogs, people. Silent testaments, impressions in river clay to prove the passage of time.

The water is cold and chills the earth despite the sun. She is a big fast river from the mountains and she claims the lives every year of unwary swimmers who come only to escape the heat. From where I stand with my toes near the lapping edge, it appears her surface in the middle of the current, probably thirty feet from me, is on level with my waist, she so bucks and races. I would not dare to ride her. I'll stay beside her, here in the shadows.