I was born and raised on an island located on the Fox River that flows near Oswego, Illinois.

The Fox is a most beautiful river and somewhat unpredictable, very much like a beautiful woman.

She, the river, could go for years without showing her ugly side, without overflowing her banks; but when she did, surprise! Flood was the result.

People were flooded out and though it was Rare, they were at times swept away and drowned.

Eventually the river would return to the confines of her banks, but during those times of flood…?

During time of flood a boat was essential for attempting to swim those rampaging waters just might end up as your last act, your last hurrah.

I swam the flood one time and soon discovered that fools especially need God’s care.

The flood, as it rose above the confines of the river’s banks had carried our boat away during the previous night thus leaving us at the mercy of the river.

During that same night as we lay in our beds there were strange and mysterious sounds, whispers of movement that were hard to decipher until we realized that the grinding, rumbling noise that could be more felt than heard were the rocks and boulders being tumbled along the river’s bed by the inimitable force of the rushing, dark waters.

The river was swollen with spring snow melt and on its crest rode all sorts of detritus. A rocking chair drifted past, somehow floating almost upright. A dog house, half submerged with a floating something that no longer tried to swim yet confined still on the end of a sodden rope. An entire side of a house with window glass still intact, a rubber hip boot, a child’s doll, its eyes staring at the overcast sky, spinning in the current. An old tire. All of these drifted past on their journey from somewhere to…where?

I don’t remember why it was so important that I reach the mainland but usually fools don’t need cause for the things they do.

I wrapped my clothing in a piece of canvas, donned an old pair of cut-offs and launched out into the flood, swimming hard toward the opposite shore.

“Swim little fishy, fast as you can, and he swam and he swam…”

The swimming was futile. I was trapped. I had spent my life on the river and thought that I knew her. She had been my friend, an intimate, and here she was trying to kill me.

I knew that the river was constantly changing. I had learned very early in life that every time I stepped into it, though it appeared to be the same, it was a different river.
I discovered that she wore a mask with two faces and the face that I saw that day scowling down on me was dark, ugly and threatening.

As I swam I noticed something bearing down on me. What was it?

A dead horse, drowned, spinning lazily in the current, one dead eye staring at me in surprise as it drifted past almost close enough to touch. It grinned at me, its teeth bared in a rictus of agony, fear and death come unbidden and too soon.

I swam and finally, what seemed like hours later, almost at my extremity, my feet finally touched bottom and I staggered, half crawled, from the river’s embrace.

Exhausted, fearful for what might have been, I looked across the river to my starting point and was grateful that I was alive. I had been swept downstream nearly half a mile from where I had started.

As life threatening as the river might have been when I was trapped in her embrace she was still trying to beguile me with her beauty for when I gazed upon her surface there was nothing there that warned of danger, in fact the surface was deceptively calm, almost serene.

It is not what is on the surface that kills, it is what is hidden beneath those deadly undercurrents. Why else do they call them “undercurrents” if not to pull you under?

But that, or so it seems to me is life, yes, life is much like a river.

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