Learning how to be of the water

Sunrise along the river. Photo by David Lansing.

This morning while Sarah Jane cooked us up Grand Marnier-flavored French toast with plump maple sausages, the River Buddha, wearing baggy swim trunks and a crisp white polo shirt, slowly dragged his foot in long rows against the sand. When Sarah Jane asked him what he was doing, he said, “Before joining the water, you must sift the sand.”

I sat on my camp stool outside my tend wondering what the hell he was talking about. Did he mean that the only way to understand life is to live it? Or that in order to plumb the depths of our emotions we must first sift through the emotions of others?

I don’t have a clue.

A few minutes later, he found a rusty horseshoe buried in the sand. With a formal bow, he gave it to Arlo, as if it were a rare artifact. “Today we have good luck,” he said. He then donned a faded red floating device over his polo shirt and walked slowly into the river as if he were planning on drowning himself. Baptized, he falls backwards and begins to drift slowly down the river.

This did not make Arlo happy. He told the River Buddha that he could not be alone in the river.

“Don’t worry,” the River Buddha said as he drifted farther away from shore. “I am not in the river, I am of the river.”

Maybe, I decided, the River Buddha is on to something here. I ran down to the water’s edge where the crew was packing up the supply boat, found a PFD and waded into the river, feeling the cold current, a foot or so beneath the surface, pulling me into the stream.

The PFD was so buoyant it lifted my back and head almost out of the water, as if someone were holding me up from beneath. Certainly I must have looked ridiculous, floating on my back, arms out, head tilted to the sky. The River Buddha fluttered his hands, allowing me to catch up. And then the two of us floated, like so much driftwood, as the river washed us down, down, down.

This was very different from being in the oarboats. When you are in the water, rather on the water, you become a part of the river. Like a pebble carried in the current. Like the snowy egret calmly standing in the shallows, just yards from where we passed, fishing for his breakfast, unconcerned with the two large white bodies passing in front of him.

“This is really quite amazing,” I said.

The River Buddha put a finger to his lips. For the next two hours, as the river carried us over shallow sandbars and beneath turquoise skies where red-tail hawks dipped and soared in warm air currents, I was as quiet as a stone.

Listening to life.