Riverbend Journal

It sounded like a long rusty ring-shanked nail giving way to a crowbar and releasing a decades old grip from a well-seasoned piece of timber... only wetter. Despite being in the middle of a crowd of talking people one evening well past sunset at my parents farm, I heard the noise clearly somewhere in the dark behind me and I now turned to seek out the source. It didn't take me long to realize that the noise had been a magnificent specimen of a fart and that the farter had been none other than grandpa. As I stared into the darkness in disbelief at where he was standing about a half dozen paces away from everything, I suddenly hoped that nobody else had heard it mostly because this was mixed company, half family and half neighbors and friends. As I turned to rejoin the conversation taking place on all sides, people seemed to be so engrossed in their conversations that they hadn't heard what had just taken place or they were being polite by pretending to be engrossed in their resp...

My stomach nestled firmly high up in my throat near where my tonsils would have been had I not had them taken out as a kid. My testicles crawled up inside my body and had my bladder been full it would have emptied. I was floating in my small yellow kayak about fifty feet upstream of Monastery Falls where a boy had drowned fishing not five days before and I was terrified. The water bunched up from the normally wide expanse of the river and pounded its way through the two large granite rocks at the head of the falls not five feet apart. The river was up and the hole at the base of the upper seven-foot drop was a monster. It was one of those that would swallow me whole and spit me out a couple hours later like a stale burp. Random blobs of foam flew up from beyond the brink as the roar of the rapids approached. My instructor was standing near the top of the upper drop eyeing my approach and form that right now was desperately feeling like it belonged on a nice couch back in Iowa instead o...