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Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Raft





This, of course, is the wrong riverside, the view of green and brown mountains against the sharp blue sky, a distortion of the truth I am used to seeing.
My shoulder was always facing the hills, my gaze shifting from side to side, studying the reeds between me and the water, like a Tom Sawyer dream I never really realized when I was young.
Oh, we did managed to build a raft here, from the lid of an old airport shipping container we found dumped on the embankment where a careless truck driver had dumped it after ripping out the contents for re-sale in Passaic, our vehicle literally falling off the back of the truck the way the secretative sales person would say later about the merchandice the container contained.
Me and Dave even bravely mounted that piece of trash, procuring poles from the fallen branches from the nearby wreckage of trees, shoving ourselves out into the slow flow near the highway bridge, our destination Passaic and beyond, neither of us remembering the six step Garfield Falls inbetween -- though we never even made it that far.
One corner of the crate caught on a stone from which we could not budge it, snapping our poles in the effort before agreeing to abandon ship, the two of us, swimming from the ruins in fear of rats and snakes, seeking the warm bed we had left at home, thinking how we would explain our dripping brown water on the carpet in the hall, climbing those dusty hills to where we lived, both of us, oddly happy.

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