Laughter tumbles over wet, earthy-smelling rapids. A succession of bodies on streamlined plastic, trimming on the left, correcting on the right, watch out for that big rock there, look how pretty the sky is. A vape passed from one hand to another. Coconut? Don’t you dare drop it in the water. A flask holding a small quantity of whiskey. Not near enough to generate a buzz, but a sufficient amount to share while floating through time and rugged country. The river applauds.
The yellow dwarf sees all.
If you try to go back, forces push against you. Until you decide to turn and let those forces propel you in the right direction, every inch you gain is a fight.
Time. Gravity.
The current.
South toward lower elevations, toward bigger pools, toward the gulf. The yellow dwarf holding the solar system together, turning skin red, encouraging cypress trees to come find it, burning vapor off the meandering stream.
You stop paddling. You lie back. The century-old trees lining the river touch fingers, the canopy overhead shading you from the yellow dwarf. Just enough of the star’s radiation, you have life. Too much, you die. You can lie here for ten minutes and float, undisturbed. You would awake after 600 seconds and smile and stretch and resume paddling.
But an hour? Sunburn. A day? Dehydration. Two days? Death.
You take the ten minutes. You have learned over the years and you cover up when you paddle. You hear low grunts and you shush everyone and point to a mother feral hog and her four piglets trotting in a line behind her through the tall grass on the bank above. You hunted her kind once. Now you watch. One day you might be hungry again, without remorse, but today you are sated and you only watch Mama and her piglets melt into the woods, and you know you’ll never see them again.
The water runs over the rocks. An alligator gar spooks when you glide over it.
You listen to them laughing in their kayaks, in their youth, experiencing the different vibrations of a trillion distinct atoms and the budding trellises of connecting worlds. You remember that age with your own friends on a different river in a different century when what you wanted awaited you in a bigger world where all the people you knew yet breathed.
They beach inside the park’s boundary at the first rapid. You negotiate the dips and rises of the water pounding into bed rock and manipulated boulders, coursing around some, splashing over others. Dopamine or serotonin or endorphins, or a cocktail of all the above, are squeezed out of tiny glands and dumped into your blood stream and pumped throughout your veins and that is called euphoria.
That is laughter.
Those are smiles.
Sometimes the demons are bills or the fear of change or the acceptance of growing old or disagreements at home or the understood costs of sacrifice and the comprehension of what it means to getting only one shot before the water dumps you into an unknown ocean of eternal depths. When the demons come, sometimes all you need is water over rocks.
You beach your kayak and you share the snacks you packed because they only grabbed vapes and whiskey, and you eat whatever is left after they get what they need. Because once it was you that burned and you that only packed beer and cigarettes and you that were hungry, and back then someone fed you. You caution them to cover up because the yellow dwarf is watching. They only half-listen. You accept that, too.
You were on this beach last August. It wasn’t a beach then. It was dead skin revealing the earth’s ribs. Crusted. The dying algae of lost water the only meat left, like the rotting bones of fish snatched from a shrinking pool by a chittering raccoon. Procyon lotor. The before-dog washer. You stood on those ribs and took your own photo. The smell then, rot. Stagnation.
Today they stand on the same ribs, unseen in rejuvenating waters coursing over their shoulders, making their own chitter. One of them searches for arrowheads. Another flirts. They each laugh.
You remember last year’s triple digits. A heat dome. You remember being here and seeing it all burned away and recalling a time when it had water. You know that what is now can again be what was then. That all of this bounty can be burned away by the yellow dwarf. You know that the hydrological cycle you wrote about last year never stops. You know that this water you swim in and that they play in and that forces you down over the rocks in your plastic yellow kayak is phantom water come back to haunt you.
The yellow dwarf. Drought. Vapor. Mist. Humidity. Thunder. Rain. Growth. Food. Life.
The euphoria in your veins.
The photo is taken and the kayaks are repacked and the paddles slice cool, green water. There is more laughter until somewhere down the river there is a rapid and an overturned kayak, a shout to grab a lost hat, a whine over sunken sunglasses. A missing tank top in the current.
You tell them the first rule of kayaking is tie everything down. Secure it. Because in that descending and growing force, things are gained and things are lost and the burning yellow dwarf sees all.