He saw light through the branches ahead, tan and golden. With a final jerk of his body he broke free of the trees and on all fours he let out a groan as he saw the scoop of the river in front of him. On its haughty shoulder sat a hedge of marsh grass bedecked with red-winged blackbirds that scuttled from the ground into the precarious perch of the bending brown grass. Simon made no move to stand. Instead, he knelt and gawked at the foot of the river. The sun tracked its summer path and Simon wondered if he’d been gone for months. The breeze ruffled the nest on top of his head and his hair hung damp and greasy around his ears. His stomach heaved both at the river and at the microbes that gnawed at his bowels. He felt faint, and then he heard a buzz out of place in the dampened sounds of the river’s syntax. It grew to a hum and then a thump. Simon tilted his head to look downstream and saw a car coast over a bridge and disappear down an unseen road. There, in the barren tangle of the river’s hair, in a place Simon was convinced no one else had ever been, but which, in fact, had seen four generations of loggers with axes and Swede saws, power saws and skidders, there in the travel of history that all rivers have seen, Simon sighed.

The river was colder than he remembered. He eased his wasted body beneath the cover of its surface and floated feet first toward the bridge with only his mad-capped head sticking out above the water. Compared to the noisy trail in the woods, his path down the river was smooth and quiet. The water was shallow and the banks distant over the gravelly flats. He watched the bridge’s iron ribs skate closer. The iron rivets came into focus and they shone like pimples on its rusted countenance. Soon its tattered geometry split the sun and Simon coasted through the brief tunnel where the swallows darted like bats from the recesses in the beams. He passed underneath and paddled with his arms to the right bank and clambered out. His clothes hugged his greasy body and he shivered. He climbed the boulder-strewn bank devoid now of grass and plants, showing only the casings of long-departed snakes, beer cans, broken bobbers, the filmy plastic of candy wrappers, and half a rubber boot that Simon wished had been left for him farther upstream. He stepped on the sun-warmed shoulder of the highway.