The light fell as we were swarmed down the Rappahannock toward its mouth.

For a long while, we did not speak, but were all consumed in reverie.

The farms upon the banks prepared themselves for evening. Maids drew water; boys drove geese before them.

We progressed past forests, pine woods upon the shore; and in their depths, where the dying sun hardly shone, spied a glimpse of a steep rise through the branches, mounded earth, secret paths through red needle and hillock seen briefly, then shadowed. There is no young man whose heart is not led on by such vistas, and doth not ride post before him to sweet, lonesome dells bannered with sunbeams and choired with crickets; then further, to the woods where the great Nations of the Cherokee and Shawnee have their home, so dear in the imagination of romance, hunt, and hazard; then on to the mountain pass, hard won; to the grasslands; to the fabled painted cities of the West in their vast plains.

“We must find a place,” said I, “where we can begin anew.”

No one replying, I said to Bono, “We must seek a place where we can vow to live in more perfect unity.”

Bono said softly, “There ain’t such a place.”

“Row,” said Clippinger.

“I shall find us such a place,” I said.

Bono rowed, for his were the oars; and at each draw upon them, water spilled into the dinghy, the lip being so close to the surface of the river. Olakunde and I bailed with our cups and our hands, which vessels were too small to stop the wavelets that splashed over the gunwales and dashed fore and aft, aft and fore, across our feet in rhythm with the rowing.

“Damn this boat,” said Bono. He rattled the oars on their tholepins. “It’s rotten. The wood’s all eaten. Look ye, see when I pull? Warps. You see there? Gentlemen, we is taking on some ugly water.”

“Row,” said Clippinger.

We could not judge of distance, nor of speed; nor note even the undulations of the shore, since to the eye upon the water, the shore looks one gathered rank, drawing to it all islands and coves so that they cannot be seen distinctly. We could distinguish no streamlet, no jetty, and all distances seemed one. No solid contour was certain, but all devolved with the evening into one crabbed mass, gnarled and dark beneath the moon.

The shore was dark; but the river, bright. As I bailed and Bono rowed, I vainly sought to gauge our passage through the waters, to measure the subtle articulations of current and tide and how they contributed to the flexing of the river’s vast musculature across which we slid, rising and falling with that flexion, passing through gentle vales and over knolls which every moment dispersed and regathered, until there seemed no solidity anywhere, but simply the blind will of motion.

Slowly, the boat grew lower in the water.

“I don’t know no swim,” said Olakunde.