Friday, 14 Jun 2002

SPILLIMACHEEN, B.C.

I slept better last night than I have all year. Here at the Burgess farm, Washout Creek dives through the property on its way down to the Columbia, and it runs so clear that the rocks in its bed appear to glow. At night, the creek rushes like a storm front through a maple grove. With the windows open, the creek flushed my mind clean. I fell asleep easily and slept hard. When I woke up eight hours later, I hadn’t moved. “It’s a recovery day, today,” I thought. “No swimming.”

And so it was that instead of another swim through the largest contiguous stretch of wetlands in North America, I found myself helping Joe Burgess around the farm. Joe irrigates his fields courtesy of Washout Creek, and soon enough I was burning my hands on aluminum irrigation pipes, cutting poplar scrub, and replacing sections of chain on the right-of-way gates he shares with C.P. Rail. When Joe swung past the post office, I met Spillimacheen’s postmistress of 49 years, Francis. Francis had heard about my swim (she even gave me a copy of the East Kootenay Weekly with my picture on the cover) and said to me, “I remember standing on the [Spillimacheen] bridge and watching the toilet paper float by. I hope you are planning to cover your face!”

Christopher and Rowan Swain.

Earlier that morning, Heather and Rowan left for Calgary. Before they left, I carried Rowan out into the pasture to say hello to the horses, Jilly, Sunny, and Doc (her idea). As we marched through the wet dandelions, I told her that I wouldn’t see her for a month and that I was very sad about it. I tried to explain that she and her Mom would come back to visit me in Canada after they finished visiting our extended family. She seemed more interested in the horses than my explanation, but when I finished she swiveled her head, locked eyes with me and asked, “Daddy come back?” “Yes,” I said. I was still crying when Heather walked out to meet us. As we hugged, Heather whispered, “You are doing a great thing. Have fun, get it done, and come home.”

Yesterday, I lay on my back in the river and tried to relax every muscle. A lick of water poked under my collar, but I kept my eyes closed. My ear were plugged with silicone and covered by a five-millimeter neoprene hood, so I heard little. I reached out with my awareness and tried to feel the current, to feel myself moving down river. Except for the ooze of cold around my neck, I felt no motion. I might have been on an air mattress in a sunny meadow. But when my eyes flipped back open, I was 200 yards downstream, and the river bank was slipping past at two miles an hour. Maybe I thought the current had stopped once I didn’t feel it anymore. But feel what I might, this river runs on. In stillness and in silence, we share the same wet embrace, and slide together toward the same great sea.