Purge

I needed a change of scenery, or perhaps I needed less scenery to occupy my thoughts.  I have just 4 hours left at my current part time job...They hired a new guy into my group and in the words of a co-worker, "he's just not a good person".  I don't like being around such people, so I quit, because the longer I stay the longer that dark soulless creature survives. 

I put in at the base of the Gifford Pinchot Memorial Sycamore - a rather large specimen with a trunk circumference of more than 27 feet.  From there I head up.  The river is full today, the water feels cold - rain water from recent weather.  I head upriver running thoughts through my head that don't need to be preserved.  Even my camera stays cased for the first hour.

This river is always a bit sparse for fauna.  Tree lined in almost all places, rarely is it forest lined.  More often there is a golf course or farm fields or a road behind the thin line of trees.  It's not particularly good habitat for a diversity of wildlife.  Even so, I spot a couple Green Herons within 16 minutes, a Great Blue Heron a bit farther up, and a Bald Eagle flies over dead straight down the middle of the river.

At two hours I continue to see what is up around the next bend, having not been here recently enough to remember the details.  Twenty minutes later and I've had enough.  I turn around.  With that it begins to rain, softly at first but steadily growing in intensity.  It is a steady hard rain by the time I think that I should be seeing the takeout just past the bridge...but the bridge doesn't appear.  I almost begin to wonder if I paddle in thought past the bridge.  I guess the current was slower than I thought...the bridge appears, I am saturated.  Rain is good for the purge.