Playing for Souls

Another from my beautiful vacation in Sun River Oregon. 

*

Yesterday, at five in the afternoon,  I borrowed my dad's kayak, and made a run down the Deschutes river. On the local maps it shows the "put in" spot, off to the left. then the river wanders around the top of the map and then goes off to the right and off the map entirely. There's just an arrow at the end of the map that says "Road to canoe take-out, 1 Mile". 

So whee! In the diminishing light, on an river I don't know, I went off the map in search of the canoe take-out point. Mind you, the vacation houses stop appearing along the riverbank here, and there were no visible roads, and no other people on the river. For a while I thought I had missed it, and doubled back to a place that seemed like it was maybe the point. That's when I really noticed and appreciated the fact that the river no longer looked and ran like a big lake. It had narrowed, and was running a LOT faster. gaining ground against the river was hard in this current. 

I eventually got to this potential pull-out site, pulled the kayak ashore, and started to wonder what kind of cold, mosquito-ravaged night I was going to spend out here in the pucker brush. When finally (duh!) it occurred to me to check my GPS map location on my iPhone. 

Ah. 

Here I was as clear as day. I still had about a half a mile to go to the point where the road stretched out to the river. Clearly the take out point. Excellent! 

So I hopped back in the kayak, and made a quick run down back down to the spot.  

A bunch of people could be seen on the bank once you made the final turn (even though they were little dots). "One of those little dots is my dad", I thought. 

That's when I was suddenly startled by the iPhone ringing in my life vest (very quiet out there on the river). 

It was my dad. "I think I see you." says he. 

"Yep, I see you too." says I. 

Annnnd…here I am the next morning, safe and sound. Though I did get a bit of a talk from my wife about the state of my sanity. "Going out alone on a kayak in a place that you don't know? When it's late in the day and about to get dark? That is slightly crazy, and something I would never do." she said. 

And she's right, of course. It's much more sane to sit in the vacation house and play monopoly. 

BUT-- I got to plunge out into the wild country to see things that I had never seen before. And in the undeveloped parts, when I was alone on the river,  I could pretend that I was Lewis & Clark, and that I was the first person from Western Civilization that had seen it. I slid silently through the world, with beautiful lava formations that came down to the water, towering Ponderosa pines, fish jumping all around me. 

It was a little bit out of my comfort zone, but it was AWESOME.