cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Brave, active, and she can't be what I need It took long minutes to grab a line from the stern of the canoe and tie it around a branch of the downed tree. Even longer to climb out of the water on to the trunk of a tree that had clearly been growing vertically until recently but still had poison ivy vines growing everywhere and anchored to the land. A roiling class 3 rapid lay only 6 feet beyond the outer edge of the tree. I grabbed a piece of trash -- a soda bottle Dana had plucked out of the river the day before -- and carved off the spout with a knife on my belt to make a bailing vessel. And as I shivered with the early stages of hypothermia in the 50 degree F water I bailed out the 20 gallons or so of water from my boat. The sun was about 90 minutes from setting. I considered cutting through the tree to get into the lee of it and stay out of the rapid. But even with my machete, hatchet and camp saw that would take hours. And the sun was setting and we were shivering. No way up the bank. There was the possibility of banking the boat up and getting it over the shallow water over the base of the trunk, but beside the trunk I found that the water was over my head and there was no place to stand while hauling the boat over. I went back and forth over a maze of poison ivy to find this out. We ended up chopping though poison ivy vines through the water that still connected the tree to the land. And using that space to back up and maneuver into the gap around the edge of the tree. We had to do this backwards because we didn't have enough room to turn the boat around in the current. And we shot the miniscule gap between the end of the tree and the side of the rapid, and the end of the tree scraped us both and we barely made it around the edge. Dana did very well. So well that I feel bad about things. She's an outstanding person. I want to have more kids. I need someone who can still have babies, and wants to. But she stayed calm and listened to me and performed very, very well and deserves a lot of credit for that day. Dana doesn't want to have children, even if she could. If she were younger, if she wanted kids, she'd be a keeper. And it's kind of heartbreaking to come out of this with the realization that this brave, active person can't be the wife and mother that I need. 12:26 a.m. - 2018-05-01 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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