Potomac

Since becoming a kayaker and, with my husband’s job and natural interests, learning more about water, I find I am beginning to relate to familiar rivers as entities.

Over the past two years especially, we have spent a great deal of time in (swimming), on (kayaking), or beside (biking/camping) the Potomac River, from its Appalachian beginning as a shallow, rock-filled spurt to the fat, growth-choked course that empties into the Chesapeake Bay.

I feel affectionate towards this river as one would towards a more human thing.

Two pictures from this weekend: one, the Potomac at night under a limply full moon; the other, when a persistent downpour just had stopped.

Fortunately, for neither of these pictures can I provide the accompanying audio: a collection of people a couple hundred yards upriver at another primitive campsite, who also had driven several miles down dirt roads our bikes would have handled more easily than our car did, for seemingly the sole purpose of recreating a stereotype that Kenny Chesney and his ilk have marketed with regrettable success—both for the sake of country music and, apparently, camping. These folks did have the good sense to bring a couple buckets of Wild Turkey (a solid choice, even if in excess). However, they also had the bad sense to steal or otherwise acquire a police broadcast system, with which we were awakened Saturday morning; to try to canoe drunk, screaming unconvincingly to each other that they loved the outdoors; and to blare on a 1980s boombox music that I can only imagine was the mixtape played at their 7th grade dance. Late Saturday night they switched to a solid hour of Johnny Cash—an upgrade for which we could not be too grateful.