There was a middle-aged fellow sitting outside the store, on a bench in the shade, drinking beer. He had about a month’s growth of whiskers on what passed for a face. I bought him another can of Coors and tried to draw him into conversation. He was taciturn. Would not reveal his name. When I asked him what he did around there he looked up at the clouds and over at the river and down at the ground between his boots, thinking hard, and finally said: “Nothing.”

A good and sufficient answer. Taking the hint, I went away from there, leaving him in peace. My own ambition, my deepest and truest ambition, is to find within myself someday, somehow, the ability to do likewise, to do nothing—and find it enough.

Somewhat later, half waterlogged with watery beer, we went for a swim in an eddy of the river, naked, and spouted silty water at the sky. The river tugged at our bodies with a gentle but insistent urge:

Come with me, the river said, close your eyes and quiet your limbs and float with me into the wonder and mystery of the canyons, see the unknown and the little known, look upon the stone gods face to face, see Medusa, drink my waters, hear my song, feel my power, come along and drift with me toward the distant, ultimate and legendary sea….

Sweet and subtle song. Perhaps I should have surrendered. I almost did. But didn’t. We piled ourselves wet and cooled back into the truck and drove down the shore to the ferry crossing, a mile beyond the store. There was a dirt-covered rock landing built out from shore, not far, and a pair of heavy cables strung across the river to the western bank. The ferry itself was on the far side where Art Chaffin, the ferryman, lived in a big house concealed by cottonwoods. We rang the bell, as instructed by a signboard. Nothing happened. We rang it again. After a while a man appeared among the trees on the opposite shore, stepped aboard his ferry and started the engine, engaged the winch. The strange craft moved across the river’s flow toward us, pulling itself along the sagging cable. It was not a boat. It appeared to be a homemade barge, a handmade contraption of wood and steel and baling wire—gasoline engine, passenger platform, vehicle ramp and railings mounted on a steel pontoon. Whatever it was, it worked, came snug against the landing. I drove my pickup aboard, we shook hands with Art Chaffin and off we went, across the golden Colorado toward that undiscovered West on the other side.