Analog SFF, May 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

I had no idea what to do with a three-day weekend, but Joe caught me as I was loading tools into the truck. “Any plans?” he asked.

  I shook my head. Other than making another dent in Anthony's stock of microbrews there didn't seem to be many options, but Joe was another churchgoer, and he might not approve if I told him. Drinking alone has never been my favorite thing, but even if I could tolerate them, going out with Anthony's baseball friends was a pretty damn sure way to get found out.

  “I might be able to arrange something,” he said. “Call me in the morning.”

  That was something I probably couldn't do. I didn't know his last name and unless he was on Anthony's speed dial as Joe-the-Cop, I didn't have much chance of figuring it out. “Why don't you call me?”

  Joe looked at me oddly, then nodded. “Okay.”

  * * * *

  Joe's idea of “in the morning” wasn't quite mine. The call came at 7:15 A.M., an hour at which I'd not intended to be ambulatory. But his suggestion woke me up fast.

  “How about hitting the great outdoors?” he asked. “We can't leave until after church, but a couple of the other guys from my men's group can get Monday off.”

  Crap. It had finally happened. I was being asked to go shoot Bambi. “I'm not sure I've got the energy for hunting,” I said, trying to sound like a true, bloodthirsty Red while still backing out.

  “Hunting? What on Earth would you hunt at this time of year? No, don't answer that. Someday those friends of yours are going to get you in real trouble. I'm suggesting a river trip. No guns.”

  That was a pig of another color, or whatever farm aphorism they used around here. When I was a kid, I may not have been worth much at team sports, but trout fishing was my father's only religion, and while that was too sedentary (he called it “contemplative") for me, whitewater was an entirely different matter. The main drawback to my latte-pouring job was that there was a limit to the amount of gear I could afford. No doubt I could show these Reds a trick or two, if there was a decent river in this godforsaken place.

  * * * *

  There wasn't, of course. Joe was planning a one-day outing on something called the Skookumcookumkinnaka or some such string of syllables that were probably garbled Native American for “Small River that Goes Nowhere, Slowly.”

  Where it went, actually, was to the Mississippi, which was kind of cool because it brought up images of Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn, though I'm not sure how much of that was in Iowa. The idea, Joe explained, was to drive to a boat ramp a few miles downstream from the confluence, leave a car, then drive to the start and camp, so we could get an early start on Monday and cover a lot of miles.

  “You're welcome to join us at church beforehand,” he added, but didn't seem surprised when I declined. Anthony, I suspected, was more into Saturday night sports pub than Sunday morning worship.

  That gave me all day Saturday to plan—a task that started by searching Anthony's house for any signs of canoeing or kayaking gear, and ended by driving to Iowa City to see what I could rent.

  What I got was a kayak that wasn't great but wasn't a total scow, either, because (surprise) there's apparently some semidecent whitewater down in Missouri and up in Wisconsin. Not that the Skookum-cookum-whatever was going to be even semidecent, but anything's better in a good boat, and since I was spending my money, not Anthony's, nobody was going to yell at me for splurging. While I was at it, I got a piece of scrap metal and a tube of Superglue and dealt with the hole in Anthony's floorboards. I'd gotten used to seeing ground zipping by beneath me, but in some ways, that was scarier than not getting used to it. My patch might not be elegant, but it only cost three bucks and barely took that many minutes. Afterward, I wondered why I'd done it. Back home, I'm as willing as the next guy to postpone chores. Maybe more. But hell, there's no point in over-analyzing that type of stuff. I'd been stuck in Iowa now for ... wow, more than three weeks. Anyone would be getting at least a bit crazy.

  * * * *

  The following morning, I surprised myself by deciding to join Joe at his church. Partly, it was convenient: I could leave Anthony's rattletrap car in the church lot and ride with the others. But mostly, I was curious.

  I'm not sure what I expected—maybe a bunch of political preaching that would prove these folks really were Neanderthals. What I got were snickerdoodles. That's right: those sugar-and-cinnamon cookies your mother made when you were a kid. Small-town Methodists, I gather, are into baking.

  Of course, the snacks came during social hour, after the preaching, but the sermon was also Mom-and-cookie stuff. Unless I'm missing something and “Blessed are the peacemakers” and “Judge not lest you be judged” are somehow political. All I thought was that it's too bad Reds don't know how to do either, even if it's the same wimpy stuff I used to hear during my Catholic period, back when my father and his cronies were lining up to vote in the Exchange. Still, whoever heard of Reds being as wishy-washy as Dad and my lit prof?

  Then it was over, and we were heading for the river.

  It lay northeast of Troy, about midway between the Wapsipinicon and the Skunk. Farther north was a river called the Turkey. Bad signs, all around.

  But scouting it out, it didn't actually look all that unpleasant. It didn't have much current, but it made up for it with mazelike riffles where the rocks were so closely spaced I was going to be wishing for a hinge in a middle of my kayak in order to squeeze through the turns. “Butt-bumpers” is what rafters call such things back home, where there's a real risk of bruising your coccyx. Here the main concern was having to wade the shallow spots in water that was probably half cow piss and farm chemicals.

  There were five of us: Joe, me, and three guys I initially thought of as Larry, Moe, and Curly, though eventually their names resolved to Cass, Hamilton, and Parnell. Joe and Hamilton also had kayaks, Cass and Parnell had a scuffed-up canoe that looked older than both of them combined, which might be possible, since Joe, at thirty-two, was the old-timer of our group.

  It took all afternoon to set up the car shuttle and pitch camp in the state park where we planned to launch. On a Sunday evening, we were about the only folks there, which was good because Parnell and Cass had enough camping gear to outfit an entire troop of Boy Scouts. Back home, I've done a bit of backpacking, which means my first questions about camping gear are “How big is it?” and “How much does it weigh?” These guys must have been looking for the opposite answers. We might not actually be chasing Bambi, but we were outfitted like a full-blown safari, with folding chairs ranged ‘round a roaring bonfire, cast-iron skillets, and a stove that gave off enough heat to boil coffee practically before the pot touched the burner.

  Since it was a church group, I was expecting a bunch of hallelujahs and goodie-goodie talk. Instead, someone broke out a flask of pretty good scotch, even if we did have to drink from paper cups. Then, when Hamilton and Cass started talking baseball, Parnell cut them off. “Jeesh guys,” he said, “just for once, could we talk about something else?”

  With religion and baseball off the menu, I figured the only thing left was politics. I was steeling myself for a round of Blue-bashing equivalent to what my own friends and I would say about Reds, but instead Joe said something about how there was supposed to be a great meteor shower tonight if it wasn't too hazy to see it, and for the rest of the evening we peered at the sky and talked about all kinds of topics, most of them as politically neutral as you can get. Well, not totally neutral, but they were old stuff, from before my time. As a space buff, Joe was still bent out of shape about how two decades ago, we'd turned over the Mars base and the rest of the space program to the Chinese in the aftermath of the Six Days’ Secession.

  I'll admit I was more interested in discovering that we also had a bottle of brandy, though I did perk up when Joe told Cass and Parnell that at one point there were something like six competing USAs. History's not my thing, and I'd forgotten that Blue states were involved too, even before the Delmarva Confederacy. That was the final secession, the on
e that left D.C. as the hole in the donut, cut off from everyone else, encouraging the politicos to get serious about doing something to resolve the crisis. The Delmarva folks were Dad's heroes, especially the Virginia Reds who helped force the issue by hooking up with the Delaware and Maryland Blues. As I said, Dad's pretty wishy-washy. How else could he have Reds for heroes?

  Eventually, of course, all of that let's-get-together stuff led to the Exchange. Somewhere in the process, we apparently sold off the space program to help balance the budget or something, and Joe was still mad ‘cause he has to pay a Net fee to the Chinese each time he views pics from the Titan and Europa rovers. “At ten cents a pop,” he said, passing me the scotch, “the Chinese are making more off the Net royalties than the rovers cost them to build. Talk about a bad bargain.”

  Even with the scotch and the brandy, all of that history was kind of boring, but overall, the evening was enough to make me praise the Lord for small favors, even if I am an agnostic. Kinda creepy, though, because here I was with a bunch of Reds, having a conversation about shooting stars and the like, just like they were Blues.

  * * * *

  It must have been a while since Anthony had slept on the ground because I twisted and turned all night long, only to wake early, with all kinds of irritating little aches and pains.

  Even though the sun was barely above the horizon, Parnell was rummaging in a gigantic ice chest in the backseat of his car. A moment later, he straightened, pulling out a margarine tub, which he upended into a skillet, dumping out a translucent lump of something studded with grotesque yellow bubbles and smaller bits of brown stuff.

  “What the hell is that?” I asked, forgetting I was in a church group.

  “Sausage and eggs. Frozen. It's the easiest way to transport them. Don't worry; it's a lot more appetizing when it's cooked.”

  Moments later, his industrial-strength stove had converted the whole lot into a tasty scramble. The others were awake by now, and half an hour later, we were on the river, floating into the dawn mists.

  * * * *

  The Skookum-Hookum wasn't quite as shallow and bumpy as it had looked, though back home, nobody in their right mind would paddle such a river. But here—hey, if it was this or staying at home with the cat ... In fact, playing thread-the-needle through the riffles was kind of fun.

  Then, leading our little flotilla, I rounded a bend and found a single strand of wire sagging across the water.

  “Cripes,” I said, backpaddling to a halt as Joe drifted up beside me. “Is that a fence? How can anyone fence a river? Isn't that illegal?”

  “Maybe. Fences across navigable rivers are, but what's ‘navigable'?”

  That was easy. “We're navigating it.”

  He grinned. “Yeah, but that's by our definition. To a farmer, ‘navigable’ is anything too deep for cattle to wade. He might think we're trespassing.”

  “You're kidding.”

  “I didn't say we are. Just that some sleeping dogs are best left to lie.”

  By now, Cass and company had caught up and were paddling toward shore, where fenceposts held the wire chest-high above the ground. Joe did the same, but I didn't like the look of the beach. Rather than nice, clean sand, it was heavy, black mud. There had to be a better way.

  The wire was only a foot or two above the water, so I climbed out and waded forward, reaching out to lift it for my boat to drift underneath. “Hey,” I called, “it's not even barbed.”

  “Of course not,” Joe said. “It's—”

  A powerful jolt surged through my wrist, elbow, and shoulder. I yelped, lurched, and nearly fell over backward.

  “—electric...” He was facing me now, and sounded like a man trying very hard not to laugh.

  The others showed no such compunction. “Way to go, Anthony!” someone said. I think it was Hamilton. “Is that how you used to test the power, back on your daddy's farm?”

  They could laugh all they wanted. Let Anthony explain, if they were still laughing when he got back. At the moment, I had other matters in mind. “How did you know...?” I said to Joe.

  He was looking at me oddly again, just as he had when I'd carried that first bag of shingles to the roof. “That the power was on?” he finished, though he had to know that wasn't my intended question. “I didn't. But when you see insulators...” He gestured to a pair of white ceramic cylinders, holding the wire out from the fencepost.

  Crap. We don't have booby traps like that back home. Unless the espresso machine qualifies. Or the parking regulations at Redwood Coast. Figuring those out was nearly as good as taking a course in logic. Not here, unless this, except for that. That's a triple negative, I think. Once, I got a ticket for parking my scooter in a reserved spot in an indoor garage. “Reserved!” I'd shouted when I found the ticket, imploringly raising my hands to the heavens. “Where the hell does it say ‘Reserved'?” And there it was, painted on the roof, like a direct answer from God. Who the hell checks the roof for parking signs?

  Now, my wrist and elbow still hurt just because Anthony's subconscious had flaked out on me again, not bothering to tell me that “no barbs” means “look for insulators.” “Crap,” I added aloud, because I had to say something.

  It was time to apply some of that college education, rather than getting down in the muck to go under the fence on my hands and knees, like a ... well, these guys might not be hog farmers, but I'd be damned if I'd do it.

  I thought a moment, then reached forward with my paddle, intending to lift the wire daintily, without touching it. At the last second, I realized that the paddle was wet. I pulled it back, dried it, then carefully lifted the wire, braced for another jolt. But this time, nothing happened. Moments later, I was back afloat, waiting on the far side for the others to finish dragging their boats through the mud.

  Joe was still watching me, though he didn't say anything.

  * * * *

  A couple of miles later, we came face to face with one of the reasons for the fence. It was a bull, eyeing us from the middle of the channel.

  “Holy ... cow,” I said, this time remembering the company I was keeping, though my choice of bail-out aphorisms wasn't exactly optimal. It had been an unusually muggy morning, and the beast was obviously trying to keep cool. I sympathized, but had no idea what to do.

  “Just go around it,” Joe said, pulling up beside me.

  “You're kidding.” I might be a city boy, but even I know that two or three feet of water wasn't going to do much to slow down a ton of angry muscle. “I'm not going anywhere close to a bull.”

  Joe shot me yet another glance. “It's a cow,” he said. “Milking shorthorn by the look of her.”

  “Oh.” Now that I looked, I could see the udder. Still, she was enormous. Heart thumping—and not in the fun way that comes with good whitewater—I steered close to the bank, stroking hard to build up speed. Then, as smoothly as possible, I glided by, attempting to broadcast “nice doggie” thoughts as the big head turned to follow my progress. I survived, so it must have been the right decision.

  * * * *

  By the time we reached the Mississippi and stopped for a snack, it was midafternoon. The morning's mugginess had produced mushy-looking clouds that were beginning to coagulate into bigger clumps, but it hadn't rained anytime since my arrival. Nor, for that matter, had it ever gotten chilly enough to require a jacket. But one of the things that comes from growing up near a large, cold ocean is an unwillingness to trust the weather any further than a Red's promise. I didn't care that the forecast was calling for a high of ninety-three degrees; I'd have felt naked without a fleece and a windbreaker in my day bag. When you're wet, the temperature doesn't have to drop all that far to spell trouble. Still, I'd been pretty surreptitious about packing the fleece because as far as I could tell, nobody else was bringing anything warmer than a T-shirt and swimming trunks.

  At the moment, though, we were in sunshine, with the worst of the clouds far over toward the southwest, where nobody seemed all that co
ncerned about them. Or at least not Parnell, Cass, and Hamilton. Joe was catching a nap. I bet that two-job thing makes him good at it. I certainly wasn't going to be the one to disturb him. I'd already blown it with the fence and the “bull.” These folks lived here; surely they knew their own weather.

  An hour later, when I was beginning to think we were going to wind up rooting here like a bunch of bushes, Joe stirred, then checked his watch. “Yipes,” he said. “Why didn't someone wake me up?” He glanced at the sky. “Time to get going. We've got about seven miles with essentially no current. That's going to take a while.”

  * * * *

  Anthony's body wasn't really built for hard paddling, but for once I was relying on skills I'd learned myself, rather than ones I'd been trying to dredge out of his subconscious. Still, I suspected I'd pay for it in the morning, even though all of that shingle toting had at least toned a few of the right muscles.

  There was very definitely a thunderstorm brewing. I was all for scooting for the take-out point as fast as possible, but a breeze was springing up, and the others were having trouble with it, particularly Cass and Parnell in their big, unwieldy canoe. Joe and I kept pulling ahead, then having to wait.

  “Why the hell did we park so far away?” I asked during one of these breaks.

  “No choice. Don't you remember the big fight eight or ten years ago, when the state decided to buy up all of this bottomland for a wildlife refuge?” Joe shook his head. “Sometimes you amaze me, Anthony. Don't you pay attention to anything? It was all over the papers: farmers, birders, fishermen, environmentalists, water-skiers, all going at each other. It's why I wanted to come here. There are no longer any roads over there. And in case you haven't noticed, there aren't any motorboats out here, either.”

  I hadn't noticed, but now that I looked around, the river was empty except for one large ship. “What about that?” I asked, mostly to be obstreperous. I was still trying to digest the image of environmentalists in a Red state.

  “It's a barge," Joe said. “Jeesh, Anthony, sometimes I think you like playing dumb.”