That's the guy on the right. The woman on the left is his wife, who showed up every day in the blistering heat with a different pretty sundress, sweet as a morning glory. Everything I've described from the geography, through LaLee's Kin and Reggie Barnes, happened on the first day. In the late afternoon, we took a bus to a state park on the levee. You can't really SEE the river most places, because of the levees. In fact, some of the kids here have lived five miles or less from the river and have never seen it. Even at the park, we could only see it from a distance. A fried catfish dinner was served at the park. The river began to become almost a mythic entity to me, then, something like the Oracle at Delphi. Although we were never far from the river, that was the closest we ever actually got to it.
It's the third biggest river in the world, and is incredibly dangerous. Sometimes currents flow in both directions at one time, with whirlpools besides. I began to understand Mark Twain and Huck Finn a lot better at about that point.
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