On a mild winter morning a young woman, alone in her travels, wound down the mountainous blacktop strips between two piney towns of the highest elevation. On a soft curve with little moisture and no conclusive reason for doing so, her SUV made a wide swing, tumbled some twenty feet, and wound up top-to-the-river-rock, tires turning hopelessly in the crisp alpine air. By the time I helped to pull her out, nobody could be certain how long she’d been buckled into that watery tomb. Her three season downy coat and hood made it impossible to know much about her vague form until we’d managed to get her onto flat ground. When she came to rest I saw that she was twenty something, beautiful, and except for the fact that she wasn’t, seemed to be full of life. She was free of visible concussive injuries and her hugely dilated eyes stared uncaringly into the gray skies above. High on a ridge to the east, a tempered mountain goat watched as the river, who is the unequivocal epitome of the hopelessly irresistible Bitch-Goddess, took this woman’s vitality and left simply a youthful husk. 

I’ve never thought highly of the supernatural legions claimed to haunt the skies and wreak uncertainty upon our affairs. Their intangibility makes me question their motives and I suspect that when the universe begins its cyclical contraction, the cards will be dealt in our favor making clear that all along these apparitions depended more on us than we on them. But a tangible Goddess, I can jibe with that. Give me a fluid force larger than me, totally indifferent to my plight, with a fixable point in the time-space continuum. One that I can hurl insults at, dive into, thrash mercilessly my frustrations out upon her, cleanse my skin, fall in love with, be carried away by, and ultimately rediscover a particular meaning of life. Give me the cruel and stunning River Goddess. 

My first encounter with this elemental temptress was when I was an eight year old boy. I stepped for the first time into a languid river that was neither deep nor rapid but which threatened, nevertheless, to sweep my spindly, bug-bitten legs from beneath me, carrying me to some uncertain fate. I inched out over polished rocks and gravel to the deepest section of the flow where by sheer determination and the terror of my imagination alone did I manage to remain anchored. It was a sunny day in my grandparent’s rural Indiana with the verdant lusts of the Midwest’s foliage thriving and vining in every nook and moistened crevice. I saw my gray-headed grandmother readying a pb&j and Coca Cola picnic on the bank. She and my grandfather were oblivious to my delightful, prepubescent struggle with a serpentine siren statutorily tempting an impressionable mind with the promise of a future blushing with wonderful dangers. When my grandmother beckoned, I returned reluctantly: undeniably pleased to be out of the indeterminable callings of the flow, but now longing to throw myself back and be consumed by whatever satyress lurked in the waves. 

I still long to return to that shore and give it another go, but time pushes on. The natural world has an inscrutable respect for timing. It checks no clocks, frets no deadlines, but when it’s time, it’s time. Summer of 2008. A man in his seventies and a companion were kayaking in the Arkansas River. About ten o’clock that morning a call came in to emergency services that a victim was out of his kayak and cast unshod upon the high flows. A well orchestrated response from EMS and the help of the rafting community allowed responders to retrieve the man from the river not long after he’d lost consciousness. 

Initially, the septuagenarian had been disgorged from his kayak but his buddy managed to pull him at once from the river and right him on a rock mid-stream. The two old friends apparently spoke for a moment making sure everything was ok. The man in the boat went to find and haul his partner’s craft back to the rock, but somewhere along the way the hapless victim slipped off his perch and into the river’s whim. I assisted, some minutes later, in pulling his body, surprisingly heavy and pale, onto shore. He’d transformed into an insensate heap of ungoverned nerves and cells. A bracelet clinging to his quickly-stiffening wrist asked that he be left as he was. 

One can never know for sure what goes through the heads of those who have gone for good to whatever other side there may be. One imagines that each victim fights for every last breath, that fear and adrenaline are shooting like heroine through all the hundreds and thousands of constricting capillaries. But I don’t know that that’s necessarily the case. Maybe that man sat upon the rock, took one look around at the wild thrashing white-crested ambulations crashing unapologetically in the melee of life and said, “That’ll do damnit. That’ll do.” Then, without regret or restraint, slipped submissively into the clutch of the Goddess’s wet spasms. Perhaps he was finally overcome by the River’s eternal message: beauty and death are inevitable – might as well take the plunge. 

In spite of death, especially at a river’s edge, there is an undeniable beauty about us. Come back to the place of this man’s demise after one earthly rotation. At the site of the apparent tragedy you will see clearly the other side of the river’s mandate. You will find this ribbony old gal not doling out cloaks of eternal shade, but coercing the beauty of life itself to explode upon the day. Taught, tanned, and able skin stretched over the toned curvatures of the young, the healthy, the adventurous. The bright smiles and clear eyes shimmering with wave-cast light. The camaraderie, the laughter, sex in the sun, blue skies, the kinship of the otter and the Colorado Cutthroat. Intoxication, innuendo, discovery and furtive play. Rafters and their guides tacking about the surface like the gilded offspring of wayward cherubs and Charon, the Styx ferryman. 

The river, you see, is not to be feared; it is to be respected. As the seasons change and winter dies out, the cycle of the goddess begins again. The Spring runoffs signal the onset of her sanguineness heat: still somewhat predictable but flush with invitation and fraught with fickle fluctuations and incurable madness. She will take her victims and her lovers without pause and begin again to sew the wild whimsy of life. Don’t hold back in fear or moderation. She’s waiting for you to make the dive and drink the currents deeply.