We rattle down the gravel road toward the dark, sluggish, tree-lined river in our old Ford pickup. My father drives, big hands scarred and swollen clutching the pock-marked steering wheel, his greased and sweat-stained hat, a once gray fedora like men wore in the fifties, sitting at a no-nonsense angle on his dark hair. Swimming is like everything else we do, purposeful, challenging, and fun.
Catherine Creek runs full stream through the town of Union, slow and moody at times, savage during the winter run-off. Down from the mountains, it isn't so far across from bank to bank, but the currents that swirl winter-white foam over a spill of rocks are unpredictable, deceptive in their prettiness.
We swim in August, a heated month when temperatures seem almost unbearable on a tractor or in a truck, or even sitting a horse, but just right for a swim in a river that has lost most of its spirit. The gravel road ends just yards short of a grassy bank, an easy step into water so clear, moss-covered rocks on the bottom shine a luminescent green. Overhead, shafts of light thrust between dark cottonwood branches only to explode in Forth-of-July sparkles off the gray-green surface.
I get a clutch in my belly before I slip into the river. It isn't the temperature of the water so much as what I might encounter that slows me down. I'd learned early on it
was necessary to swim with your lips shut tight. I'd had my fill of spitting and coughing up a chance swallow of something grimly dead, yet still identifiable.
My father doesn't seem to think it the least bit odd that we swim in a wide spot of river that pools just downstream from the county slaughterhouse. Nor do I, at the time question his choice. He is a good swimmer, and an even better floater, lying on his back, eyes looking up overhead where he spots the swirling path of a hawk, and makes an occasional comment on the weather yet to come. His face, dark and chiseled, high cheek bones, brown-black eyes, sometimes sports a small bruise from the boxing match he'd won a few days ago in the city.
I flail about, toes searching for the bottom, arms stretched out to get a bead on an oncoming floater, thinking how to avoid contact with the huge eyeball encased in a skull rolling on a path sure to smack straight into my face. I can jump in water, sometimes better than I can jump on land. Over a year or two, I learn to identify parts of animals that I have no desire to recognize. Chunks of muscle, thick and powerful, a runner's leg. A bloody bone that should have sunk from the sheer weight of it, but chose unreasonably to float, black and white ears, so suddenly separated they stand alert and thoughtful, a pig's small stomach, like the one my father once dried and puffed full of air, only to give the thinly delicate vein-laced balloon to me for a toy.
A sense develops that if I touch a piece of the animal so newly dead, I might see in my mind the whole of it. The sweet Holstein who'd given milk for years on end and then gone dry—the boar my father determined had the instincts of a three-year-old child, the sway-backed horse no longer fit for a ride. Leftovers from what had once been worth effort and affection pass on down stream with no more than a sigh of wind and a bird's shrill cry.
Years later, when I purchased freshly cut bones for my dogs to gnaw, I found that as I held the bones in the palm of my hand, fingers splayed to keep from touching the small remaining bits of meat—an instant mind-picture, a photo of what remained locked inside the bony DNA flashed into being--a red and white Hereford steer, I'd think, startled, dropping the bone on the tiled floor. It became too much, too difficult recognizing memories now casually scattered among the coolers in butcher shops, a sprig of green parsley to dress up the bone and meat lying in wait to be chewed at by someone's dog.
After half an hour of paddling back and forth, shivering and shaking, I climb out of the water and dry off my shorts and shirt with a heavy towel and head for the truck. I might have chosen to stay back at the house, but I never do. I always come along when asked. After all, I am the second daughter of a father who shows no pain, not even the time when he cut his arm open to the bone, and later drove himself to the hospital. A father who gives his daughters boxing gloves and intricate lessons on how to settle their disagreements.
But most of all I agree to the invitation because it is time spent with my father, and I never would think to limit the conditions.
Decades later, I drove by that same stretch of river, now bordered with vinyl-sided manufactured homes sporting tiny plots of crab-grass that butts up against the land
where the slaughterhouse once stood. The river flows just beyond. It looks almost, but not quite normal...somewhat less threatening. I have accepted the fact that I will never be much of a swimmer. Swimming seems confrontational, a battle to avoid if possible. The very liquid you plunge yourself into is suspect, not to be trusted. In truth, at some unknown time, I had decided there were few good instances of companionable silence that outweigh the risks of what might be encountered.