The River-1st Draft

Every summer I go back to the river, not the wide, rambling low country rivers where I live now or the skinny little rocky streams my grandparents would have called a river in their native mountains, but the place we called “the river” that is also known as Lake Wylie.

Memorial Day always meant the first time we could go swimming. That’s when Daddy said the water was warm enough. Of course, it usually wasn’t warm enough until sometime in June, but the air and sun heated up our goose-pimpled flesh quickly enough to make that first shivering dip worth it. After anxiously awaiting all winter and spring for summer, we were dying to dive in on Memorial Day weekend no matter what the temperature. What Friday is to the working man, Memorial Day at the river was to us kids; it was the day we finally could see our whole, lazy, sun-doused summer stretch out before us like the snapping turtles stretched out on the half-submerged logs.

We—my cousins, my brother, and I—waded carefully into the cool blue-green depths, squishing our toes softly through the muddy bottom, churning up the mud that would change the water to a murky brown. We treaded carefully the first few times we went in but not from fear of the tiny nips of the bream swimming around our toes. Sure, we had heard the veiled threats of catfish as big as small cars and gar, fish with teeth? But this was pre-Jaws and who had ever heard of such a thing? We eased into the water’s edge because we never knew if someone had thrown in broken glass or old cans that would shred your feet to ribbons in a second if you found them the hard way.

My Daddy taught me to float and then to swim. I never make a dive through a salty wave or roll over to float languidly in a chlorine saturated pool that I don’t think of him.

“Really, Ronnie, you ain’t gonna’ drown. I got ya’. Lay back and relax,” Daddy insisted.

He should have understood my hesitance after all the stories he’d told me about how he and his brothers had been taught to swim. My grandpa, Pappaw Joe to me, threw them in and yelled, “Sink or swim!”

How could water that I could slice through in one minute hold most of my body afloat in the next? I wondered. Finally, I relaxed and Daddy held on and I lay back in the sun-warmed blue-green waters and I did float. At least I did until I realized Daddy had let go. Then I panicked and floundered, sinking under the stirred up muddy brown waters.

“Lesson number one,” Daddy said when I came up sputtering and gasping for breath. “Don’t panic.” That rule has applied to more than swimming in my life and when I need to hear it, it still comes back to me in my daddy’s deep, rumbling baritone.

Eventually, I moved on to dog-paddling and actual swimming strokes that Daddy taught me with painstaking patience summer after summer. Amazed by the silkiness of the river water as it slipped between my fingers, I was always a little surprised that I really could grab something that slippery and push it behind me to propel myself forward if I held my hands just right.

Our favorite games at the river were diving and breath-holding. The trick to staying under the longest, we discovered, was to have someone gently hold you down with one hand on your hand. If he or she used two hands, it became a different game of let’s-try-to-drown-each-other, which the grown-ups mostly frowned upon. Sitting on the river bottom, holding your breath, you could find yourself going into a sort of trance of counting and staring back up at the golden rays glinting down through the surface layers of the water where you had been just moments before. The layers started out clear as sunshine at the top and gently flowed into golden brown flecked with glittery mica flakes and then settled into a deeper, loamy green around you. Try as we might, we never quite beat Daddy at the breath-holding game despite his two-pack-a-day smoking habit, so we kids usually disqualified him and just competed with each other.

When we weren’t being so competitive—racing each other to shore or diving for intentionally dropped objects—we lazed in the sun on the small strip of sandy shore or on the rippling waters themselves. Hot from lying on a raft in the sun, we would slip down into the murky waters to find the cool lake water near the bottom, water that was cool even in July unlike the ocean waters at the beautiful South Carolina beaches I frequent now.

Food was secondary in our concerns then, but it tasted better in the slightly fishy river breeze than anywhere else we might be. Mostly it was just tomato sandwiches with mayonnaise tracks on your chin and red juice dripping down your still-wet from swimming elbows. Sometimes we added bologna (which we pronounced baloney) to the tomato sandwiches—not the other way around, mind you—but then we always had to sing the song, My bologna has a first name, it’s O-S-C-A-R; my bologna has a second name, its’ M-A-Y-E-R. We chased our sandwiches with Cokes icy from the Styrofoam cooler and slightly melted Little Debbie oatmeal cakes.

“Now you kids know you cain’t go swimmin’ for at least thirty minutes after you eat,” was closely followed by our moans and grunts of complaint. In those days before Nutri-System and Weight Watchers, that was the only thing we feared about food.

Sometimes we spent the night. Not that we ever really camped. Camping requires gear: tents, sleeping bags, Coleman stoves. We took a change of clothes and maybe a blanket or two. After swimming all day, the adults crashed in the car while the kids (luckier still) slept on the hoods and roofs of the cars, falling asleep next to our cousins, who were also our best friends, with the last image etched onto the backs of our eyelids being the twinkling stars in the purply-black night sky above.

The next mornings were mist shrouded river banks, orange sun sneaking peeks between the full leafed limbs of the deep green forest on the opposite bank, and groggy kids shivering around the fire while the adults cooked scrambled eggs, grits, and toast over the hastily constructed grill of a metal rack laid over the rocks surrounding the flames. The aromas of breakfast cooking in the early morning lake-dewed air were sure to rouse any late sleepers.

This was the rhythm of lazy summer weekends. Weekends before sunscreen or cholesterol worries. Weekends before the river banks became the homes of choice for the Charlotte elite. Now, when I go back, almost every square inch is staked and claimed. Half-million dollar houses occupy lots where we camped. Access is restricted to those with property deeds or boats, something we never could have afforded when I was young. But the river will always exist for me, floating in the memories of cousins, sunburn, and tomato sandwiches.