Some Things Are Lost

It happened in a river west of San Antonio, the Rio Frio. These were the first words of Spanish I knew: cold river. I was ten and I loved the cold river, the way the sound of it never stopped—spring water and rain redesigning the rocks and sliding past the smooth lines of tree roots and snakes and the secret things that hide beneath the big round rocks that God put at the bottom of the river to make that sound I loved. I would stay awake at night in the tent, stretched between my parents in the heat, listening to the river and imagining it out of the darkness, waiting for the stopping that never came.

In the day, I made dams with the other kids in the campgrounds. I struck up four day friendships and wove between our campsite and theirs, collecting firewood and attracting other people's dogs. But when it happened I was alone with my father in the river. It was a narrow river, only about ten or twelve feet wide where we stood. The other kids were eating or packing to go or maybe I'd shrugged them for awhile. I don't remember exactly, but the river made for a good place to be alone.

I'd found a spot on the river to claim, a place where a low concrete bridge had collapsed into the water years ago. Most of the slabs of concrete had already washed away somewhere, but a chunk was wedged into the rock. At the slope of the chunk of concrete, a few inches below the water's surface, a claw of iron skeleton poked out. It provided a handle to grasp amid the rushing water, the slippery ropes of vegetation, and all that water-smoothed stone.

In my aimless play, I'd found that if I held with two fingers to this iron claw, I could loose the rest of my body to the river and lay suspended by the force of the current. My whole body, my left arm and long hair, waved like all the green things that survived in the force of the rapids. Only my fear of bodies tubing over me and crushing me brought me up for air. I had my father's strong lungs and I made a habit of holding myself under for as long as possible. Though it stung, sometimes I opened my eyes to see the light dance or a minnow struggle upstream without movement, as though paused with a VCR remote. I could've forgotten to come up at all. I spent an unknowable period, hours probably, propping myself up to check the horizon for traffic and then loosing my body to the water again.

When I broke free, I felt dizzy. I threw myself back to our campsite, finding a sandwich first and my father second. He wore wet sneakers. He held an inner tube with a rope hanging off it under his elbow and a book in the other. I stopped him from making his own way to the river, but found that I could not explain to my father in words the exhilaration of being completely suspended in a moment, caressed by water and surrounded by the bouncing light six inches underwater. Not in words. Certainly not then. So, I panted, "I've got to show you something."

"Now?" he asked, "Your mother's already tied up to the tree." This actually made sense to me. My parents often tied their tubes to a tree together so that they could not float far and then drifted in a quiet spot with books: a paperback romance for my mom and a biography of Anwar Sadat for my father.

I nodded yes, now and led him to where the river curled around the broken bridge. Because I could not explain what I wanted to teach him, I demonstrated my technique. The thrill I'd discovered&#x02014...