It was late afternoon with shadows falling and the air cooling noticeably. We had an hour or more of paddling ahead of us before we'd even get to the river. "You sure you don't want to wait until tomorrow morning?" a man at the landing asked. "High as that river is, you might have a hard time finding you a place to camp." I had been thinking about this trip for a solid year and I didn't want to wait another day. Ishmael would go to sea to heal his soul. A river trip does it for me. The river was the Suwannee, where it comes out of the Oke-fenokee Swamp in Georgia and flows down into Florida through vast hardwood bottomlands. "We need to do that river," I'd said to my friend Tony when I came home to Vermont after paddling the Okefenokee. We'd do it in early April, we decided.
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