When I was married to my husband, Sam, we used to love white water canoeing. Not the superfast water where you took your life in your hands… We liked a moderate challenge with alternating pools of cool cold water interspersed with fairly challenging rapids. There was such a river in Arkansas that we canoed quite often. The time I remember best was our first trip down the river. We had just put in and paddled our canoes about a bit in open water to get the hang of it. It seemed for every set of rapids, there was a “wimp waterway” that ran alongside that was much less challenging. On our first set of rapids, we chose to use the easier waterway. As we were entering under a tree overhanging the water, Sam said to me. “Debra watermoccasin, lie down and be still”. That is just what I did, I lay on my back and looked up to an overhanging branch to see a watermoccasin wraped around a limb just above my head as I floated by. Sam lay forward in the boat and we both passed without harm except to our nerves.
I have a butterfly tattoo just above my left breast left over from my years as a stripper. I decided to swim in one of the pools and when I came up a lovely butterfly was flitting around my head and stayed with me for many miles downriver. She landed on my butterfly, flitted around my head, sat on my shoulder and behaved in a very un-butterfly sort of way. It felt like magic.
Eventually, we came to a large flock of bright yellow finches who were in the treetops on both sides of the river. Our paddles, it seemed, encouraged them to fly just ahead of us and with us from treetop to treetop down river for a couple of miles… Again, more magic ( or blessings from nature)…
Sam and I spotted a waterfall above the river so we pulled our boat over to the side and hiked up to the falls. It was delicious to let the water rush over our bodies. It was not long before we had both shed our clothes and stood nude with the water rushing over our skin. It became obvious that we were both turned on by the sensation so we began kissing and touching with the water falling over us.
We decided to make love right there in nature. I knelt on the bottom of the stream and Sam knelt behind me. We had terrific sex with the possibility that others canoeing below could possibly see us. What a turn on! I must confess, the feel of the rocks on the stream bed were hard to get past… but I managed to forget about them entirely as we got into the sensuality of the moment.
The rest of the trip, while very pleasant, was less adventurous. We were fishing for trout with kernals of corn. Folks were pulling in their limits all over. I caught nothing – until we had reached the end of the trip and the canoes were being loaded onto the truck for portage back to where we started. I cast my line one last time and my line wrapped around another line of someone who had caught this fish before. He seemed large and I was excited until I finally got him out of the water. It turned out to be a bottom feeder commonly called a “hog nosed sucker fish”. The nose did indeed look like a hog. it was obviously a bottom feeder and its skin seemed to be stretched over a hard, almost solid skeleton of bone… In otherwords a totally useless fish. I tossed him back and never had much luck with fishing after that – until I caught a 25 pound salmon just outside of San Francisco Bay many years later.
The memories of that trip linger to this day, the water moccasin, the butterfly and the wonderful sex under the waterfall… It all adds up to an unforgettable memory – just one of many I plan to share with you as we go along.
Stop back and see what I will tell you about next. All true memories, friend… Til later.
