Canoeing the Black Fork Mohican, 1978

What you remember is how you had trouble believing it was Ohio, even southern Ohio, the way the river moved and swirled, rushing over rocks, and scuttling the overhanging brush clutching the bank, and the water legibly clear to the bottom in the shallower runs, grassy and pebbled, yet not so swift as your native state’s Au Sable, mild even in most places, like most surfaces, glinting and sparkling where the sun broke on it like a silver wedding band which—in a half hour or so—would be dislodged by the drunken sidewise collision and upset in the uncertain depth of a pool, loosing a tangled moronic fury of curses and laughter, Sorry, so sorry, drifting away with beer cans and Styrofoam cooler debris . . . and what you most remember is how angry your young wife was that you’d been so careless to have lost the ring from your runner’s thin finger in the  confusion—the sanctified, irreplaceable talisman of her love—and the long, silent censure of the car ride back to your flat in the Black Swamp, and how it would be another nineteen years before she apologized for her behavior—for all the times she’d accused you wrongly—and asked if she could keep the ring’s inexact replacement, the one you’d stopped wearing years before, and, if you also wouldn’t mind, sign the legal papers in the envelope you’ll receive in a day or two.