58: Just north of Hargrove Road . . .
Little Follies, “Life on the Bolotomy,” Chapter 13 begins
13
Just north of Hargrove Road is a spot that we must admit is lovely, where the river runs clear and cool and deep through a small clearing. On a summer day, with iridescent dragonflies gleaming in the sun, it can be an idyllic spot for a cooling swim. Unfortunately, the locals know all about it, so the traveler is likely to have to share the idyll.
Boating on the Bolotomy
THE NEXT DAY DAWNED still and hot. May was gone, and Raskol had traces of her lipstick on his mouth and cheeks.
I ate quickly. I had some Spam on one of the biscuits that I had brought along. In a snit, Raskol crashed off through the bushes; eleven minutes later, still in a snit, he crashed back through the bushes, carrying a cardboard cup of coffee.
All our provisions were a mess. We threw the wet things into the boat and pushed it out into the river. Here the river was shallow and not much wider than the boat. Bushes grew right to the banks on both sides, making the space above the water narrower than the river itself. We pushed the boat into the middle of the river and climbed in. The boat bottom crunched on the river bottom.
Raskol sighed. “We’ve got to jettison some of this rubbish,” he said. He reached for the nearest bag and tossed it over the side.
“Hey, wait!” I cried. “Don’t just toss things out indiscriminately. We’re going to need some of this stuff. We’ve got to go through each of the bags and sort out the essentials from the inessential items. Then we’ve got to figure out a plan for rationing our food and water so that we know how much we can do without.”
“All right,” he said. “Here’s the plan—we’ll throw out all the food and trust to luck.”
I sighed. I began picking through the supplies and packing the nonessentials into one of the bags. Raskol sat in his end of the boat and watched. When I came to the machete, his eyes lit up.
“Where’d you get this?” he asked, snatching it from me.
“It was in the cellar at home,” I said. “My father bought it at the army-navy store. He uses it for clearing brush.”
“Now this is the sort of thing we’re likely to need,” he said. He gave me a nod and a grin, and I could see that some of his faith in me had returned. He stuck the sheath into his belt and practiced flourishing the machete while I finished lightening the load. When I had us down to the bare necessities, I loaded the boat again. We pushed it out into the stream. We climbed in. The boat floated.
The water purled along the banks, dragonflies flew alongside the boat, and water striders skittered out of our way. We began pushing ourselves along, pushing with our paddles against the river bottom, and at once we began to sweat.
“This is going to be a bitch of a day,” predicted Raskol. He peeled off his shirt, soaked it in the water, wrung it out, and put it back on. He did this with such verve, such style, that I knew he’d learned it along the docks, and it looked to me like the savviest bit of clammy know-how that I’d ever seen, so I did the same. My wet shirt stuck to my back and chest and chafed my armpits while I worked at pushing with my paddle, and as the cloth dried it became stiff and rough and chafed worse and worse.
Raskol pushed along in grim silence. I was sure that he was angry with me for having gotten him to agree to come along on this trip, and that he was taking his anger out on the river. His pushes were strong and regular, and he spoke only when he had to, to warn me of a rock or a low-hanging branch.
The river began to narrow. We made our way now through a tunnel of overarching bushes, and in the tunnel the heat lay like fog, heavy and unmoving. The leaves overhead were pale, translucent green, sunlight burning through them. The interstices between the leaves flamed with pale, lemon fire. Sweat ran from me continually now. It ran from my hair, down my back, down the sides of my face, across my forehead, and into my eyes. Mosquitoes buzzed around my head. They had bitten the upper curve of my ears so often that I looked like a pixie. While Raskol kept pushing on, staunch and rhythmical, I squirmed and twisted, slapping mosquitoes and wiping the sweat from my eyes, and when I did get a push in, it was a clumsy and ineffective effort, my paddle striking the side of the boat or catching the river bottom too early in the stroke, so that I was actually working against Raskol.
[to be continued on Tuesday, August 3, 2021]
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