(Ozy’s post the other day inspired me to try and find something I wrote when I was a freshman in college in 1994 but I couldn’t find it so I will have to re-write that piece but I did come across this hot mess during the search. I edited, added, and deleted from the original but I wrote pretty much this in the late ’90s-ish I was a miserable broken man then having gone through two divorces in three years neither of which I wanted. I was mental. I was destroyed. I was a total fuckup. Not much has changed over a few decades BUT THAT IS NOT THE POINT! The following is……. me)

What is it about water? It covers two thirds of the planet and my fondest memories all have water involved in some way or another. People fight over it. We covet others’ water. We feel we are short changed in the water department so we build viaducts, canals and ditches to get it where it wasn’t. Or we take it for granted when we have enough. We even retain it if we don’t do whatever the hell it is that makes you not retain water.

I have seen water give life and take it. It mystifies me. It intrigues me. I am drawn to it in spite of being afraid sometimes when dark memories return. This makes me sound obsessive compulsive and I am not sure that is one of the many mental flaws I posses but how would I know being all mentally flawed and all.

I am not sure what first made me love it. Was it the early sailing experiences on Blue Mesa with my friends? The early morning ski pulls behind a screaming boat on glass water on the same lake? Or just growing up next to a river? Moving water is something you can just sit and watch and it makes you content. It fills your ears, your eyes and your head. There is no room in a brain that is watching a class 3 rapid roll over itself again and again. Or breakers rolling onto a sandy beach to just recede back to where they came from and become part of the next break.

Years ago in a prior life I came back to where I live now to help my folks who were building a house at the time and visit my close and extended family. It was the yearly summer vacation my son and I made here. Western Colorado at the time was in a drought just as it is now since, well, it is high desert and it doesn’t get much rain. Who knew a desert wouldn’t get much rain. Craziness. My father and I discussed the lack of water as well as God. He being a preacher at the time ensured we would eventually get to that topic. I told him I doubted God’s influence on this earth and all that was driving anything was people’s desire to promote themselves and their situation. He informed me I had lost the battle for my mind. I informed him I was told my mind was not worth battling over.

After several great weeks my son and I left Western Colorado to go back to Oklahoma. My son had arrived a week ahead of me to spend even more time with his grandparents. We drove over Monarch pass, dropped into Salida and entered the canyon that eventually becomes the Royal Gorge. We camped along the highway in one of the state campgrounds that night.

I remember distinctly the most beautiful sunrise I have ever seen. I don’t remember the year, but I remember the day because I knew it was my sister’s birthday. I was standing watch on the bridge of a Coast Guard patrol boat somewhere between Florida and the Bahamas. A beautiful sunrise of pink billowy cumulous clouds across the sky and nothing but water in a 360 view. I had seen a lot of sunsets as well, be it from the pier on Key West, or the cockpit of a number of boats, but I never remembered one that stood out. Then it happened.

As the sun sank behind the hills and then passed over the continental divide the peaks blocked the sun’s rays and a red glow filled the canyon. Shadows moved and changed into darkness that hid under rocks and the holes in the stone walls that gave direction to the river. Birds swooped down out of the orange sky flying inches above the river to get their evening meal of bugs. I made dinner trying to fend off the bugs. I looked down through the willows at the quiet stretch of river I knew and watched a seven year old boy knee deep in the river cast a fishing pole. Alongside him stood a big red dog wet from swimming. Fish rose around the boy constantly to eat some bugs as well, but he never caught one. Poor selection of spinners in my tackle box. Across the river a beaver exited the bank and began fishing himself. Then another one. They fished and played on that calm stretch of the Arkansas as the sun set further behind the mountains and eventually the sunset gave in to darkness and the boy and dog came up the bank to warm.

I don’t know how many times I floated that river with my friends, or drove through that canyon. But I do know I saw the most beautiful sunset that night. I was in a dark time in my life then and an email from a friend asked, “have you listened to your inner child lately?” I don’t know if I had, or if I do now, but I do know if and or when he speaks he is a little boy standing knee deep in a river next to a dog like my son was that evening. And they both have something in common. You can’t keep either one of them out of the water.

And Dad, for the record. God may influence life on this planet. He may even do it every sunset or sunrise for someone out there. I think another David put it something like, “he will lead you along quiet waters” or some shit like that.