The turtle reminds me of Col. Klink. I glide past him in my canoe, watching with his rigid neck and armor, feeling like a soldier being reviewed.
“Turtles,” the children yell. Then a swan floats by, in its arrogant manner. On shore, people are running, biking, communing with their dogs, and, this being Austin, Texas, playing musical instruments and singing loudly to themselves.
An audience would be fine too. The Stevie Ray Vaughan statue is a few miles northeast. Where we dock, a woman plays a banjo, and before we realize what has happened, she has doled out a mandolin and a guitar to two of our party’s children and is teaching them a Bob Dylan song. The University of Texas women’s rowing team shoots past, its coach yelling encouragement from a power-boat alongside.
My theory is none of this immediate vibrancy could happen without the presence of water. As a tourist, I am three times as happy and engaged in a city bisected by water. Water brings out the recreation in people. Water brings out the good, wet fun. More often than not, water brings out the picnic.
Water watchers
Not that it always has to be so squeaky clean.
The school I attended in New York backed up to the East River, and when I showed up early, I liked to lean on a railing to look out at tugboats and whirlpools, at floating garbage and ancient bridges. It was thrillingly morbid to consider that, if you hurled yourself into the huge and treacherous depths, you might not come out alive. The rumor that a girl from my school had thrown herself into the river after failing Latin III had been going for at least 50 years. Or maybe she didn’t get into Harvard.
In college, I had to be content with a duck pond without any ducks.
After dropping out, I would go to the Presidio in San Francisco to enjoy dark fantasies about Alcatraz and sharks.
Cities like Tucson and Albuquerque disappointed me, because irrigation ditches don’t count. But I could sit by the banks of the Mississippi in Memphis, Tenn., for hours, even in brutal humidity. Obviously, this is because of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” and the way the book makes anyone consider lighting out on a raft.
In Denver, I am sorry to say, I found the South Platte disappointing at first. I undertook more than one ill-advised trip down it on an inner tube, and have been afraid of anything resembling a rapid since. But as the years went by, the greenbelt got greener and greener, until riding a bike from Chatfield to Brighton became an eavesdropper’s feast – the playground scene, the couples making out on benches, the tent civilizations under the bridges, and all of a sudden, kayaks!
By last year, I could count on flag-football games on lawns and 10-year-old boys splashing around in summer, the way they have since time began.
Which illustrates my point: The closer polite company comes to a body of water, the more things get interesting. Everyone knows a city whose river or coastline has been clinically depressed by industrial effluvia or plain indifference. In my adult lifetime, a lot of this damage has been undone. To my mind, it is a better improvement than wireless Internet access, air conditioning, or possibly even antibiotics. Just look at Pueblo and its Riverwalk.
On a river, it’s all good
Because you can do stuff with a river. Not just on it – with a boat, fishing pole, or your own body, swimming – but next to it. A concert by a river sounds better, a latte tastes richer, and if single people spend enough time there, they will find romance. It doesn’t matter if you want a hemp-y guy in tie-dye or some young entrepreneur out blowing off steam on the bike path after making his first mil.
How do I know this? Aimless conjecture. Leisurely snooping. Sitting, or strolling, around.
That’s what bodies of water are for.
Robin Chotzinoff is a freelance writer who lives in Evergreen.
