What Happened

Coffee Pot Landing, August 2--What happened was this: Richard started out this morning. I biked to the first crossing, five miles in, where I saw him pass 1.5 hours after starting. I went to the second crossing, but there was nowhere to wait, so I went to the third instead. Eve arrived and we waited. And waited. Eventually a car drove up behind us and the driver told us our friend was waiting at the previous crossing. He had been fine until a little ways after the second crossing, but there was a fork and he didn't know which way to go, so he tried both ways, which both ran out, so he turned around and went back, exhausted, drenched, and caked in knee-deep Mississippi Mud. I decided I wanted to try anyway, having not kayaked yet, and armed with his descriptions, set fourth (editor's note: sic, no kidding--I was tired). I decided to go left first

Ed.: here the paragraph ceased, and the following was written two days afterwards, and the intervening time and experiences might be thought to color what is written hereafter:

and was met with a nigh-unpassable channel but passed it nonetheless, until it terminated in a pool just (and I do really mean just) big enough to turn the kayak around by getting out and throwing it against the reeds; Richard later recounted to me that he had been forced to do the same, and the revelation changed the way I viewed the good spirits in which we had found him. But anyway. I turned around and walked the kayak back upstream to the fork, and barely resolved to see things through to the end (this walking, by the way, was when I shouted the Liturgy for none of the world I knew to hear--the riber bottom here is deep and kinetic mud and I have an irrationally energetic fear of leeches and other bottomdwellers and I was on the verge of tears, which in my opinion is realy the only way the Prayer really counts). So I started down that way, over a beaver dam, through chutes so shallow and narrow I had to put the paddle in the boat and pull myself through with the reeds. But I survived and now here I am.