I

"The body is a temple", she said, taking another drag from her pipe.

He eyed her from his boat, floating in the pool, the slow current forcing him to take a stroke every now and then to stay in place. She was an enigma, a complex cacophony of contradictions, a riddle he didn't care to figure out. He just came to paddle.

"Okay I'm 'bout ready" She stowed the pipe away, settled into her seat, and sealed the skirt. "You should get out and scout some of this today. Picking out your own lines will help your water-reading skills, so you won't have to rely on others so much."

"Cool...so that's how you learned this creek?" He was intrigued.

"Nah, I got some friends to show me down."

She paddled away and into the current, and he followed. As they rounded the bend and the safety of the everyday world disappeared with the put-in, he began to ponder the choices he had made lately. It had started as weekend excursions into the woods, a chance to be closer to the real mother of us all, this wonderful planet of water, tree, and rock. Long afternoons spent lounging in a cheap Coleman canoe, contemplating where and when we must have all gone mad and lost sight of the true treasure, this paradise.

And infrequent encounters with a contingent of the LL Bean fashion team. Or so he thought.

Bright colors, funny-shaped plastic pods, helmets and lifejackets, it was all too much. He had to laugh. "Who are these clowns? Embarassing embodyments of sacrilege, if you ask me!" Too serious - apparently too vain - to stand amidst this wonderland. A circus. "Show some respect to your mother, bastards!" He learned the name for them...kayakers.

So how had he come to be one of them? How many weeks and months had gnawed at him, tempted him, pushed him til he ended up on the doorstep of a local outfitter, looking for a funny-shaped plastic pod, preferrably used. People change, he said to himself.

Now here he was. And here she was. But who was she really? Paddling is usually a team sport, and he was trusting her to be the better half of this team. He didn't even know her.

They eddied out above a sharp horizon line. He grabbed the loop to pull his skirt, but she stopped him and smiled. "This is really straight-forward. If you just want to run it with me, you can scout the bigger rapids downstream." He eased his grip, put the handpaddles back on.

"I'm going to take a harder line but if you just want to bomb the main one, go off just right of center with a little right angle. The hole might grab you but you can work your way out the left side. I'll see you at the bottom." She smiled. She always smiles, he thought.

Back in the moment, he eased over to the drop and leaned out, spotting something like a tongue that would hopefully take him as far downstream through the hole as possible. Taking a couple of aggressive strokes, he reached with both hands and pulled his boat out beyond the edge, trying to flatten the hull, fighting the instinct to lean back, an instinct that wanted so badly to keep the nose up but would have only succeeded in burying it that much deeper. A sweet boof onto the pillow, up and out, and he was sitting in the righthand eddy at the bottom, waiting, enjoying.

Over the lip on river-left she came, into the meat. He cringed. Hmm, she's good. Tossed around for a few seconds, the boat swapping ends, then spit out forcefully against a large boulder blocking the exit. Didn't notice that boulder before.

Or the water sucking under it.

She cruised upside-down into the undercut, completely out of sight. Gripped by panic, he ripped off his skirt and fumbled out of the boat, half-falling and slipping on the riverbed. Grabbed his throwrope out, shoved the boat to shore, and .... ???

and what? There was nothing to do. Entombed in silence, there was nothing to do but wait. A Far Eastern quandary...in doing nothing, nothing would be left undone. But he wasn't thinking 'bout that. He wasn't thinking about anything, just hung in the rhythm of his own pulse, pounding in his ears.

Moments became hours became days, and finally the tip of her boat emerged from the downstream side. Like a runaway glacier, it's entirety floated into view. While he sought a way across the deep stream to her, the water around the boat erupted and she was suddenly up, alive, smiling. The episode had passed, had become the past. He exhaled.

"Damn, I thought you cashed out. Are you okay? What happened?"

"Of course I'm okay, silly."

"You miss your line? Where were you going?" He looked back upstream, squinting to find the magical route that would have brought her safely down the left side of the rapid.

"That was my line. That boulder always flushes, it's flushed me every time I've ran it on that side."

"You meant to do that?"

"Of course." She was smiling, had never stopped smiling.

She turned downstream and drifted off. He stood in the shallows, watching her, his skirt dripping, head reeling in the aftermath.

"the bigger rapids downstream"? "it's flushed me EVERY time"?

He gathered his gear and pushed back out into the stream, working his skirt over the cockpit rim as the current picked up speed and bore him further away from the safety of the everyday world, toward oblivion.

She always smiles, he thought. He didn't even know her.