Go Down to the River Instead

"Some folks never seen a bear at all."

In a small, white-washed clapboard farmhouse on the banks of Kentucky’s Green River, a mother straightened the collar of her ten-year old son’s first suit jacket, stepped back and nodded in approval. The house was noisy as the boy’s five sisters were also getting ready for church, a ritual that required much negotiation and laughter. The boy bolted outside as soon as his mother’s hands were off him. He waved in response to something she called after him and kicked a little dust on his new shoes to make them respectable.

The Green River emptied into the Ohio River not far from the farm. It was a land of rich soil, practical dreams and devout dreamers. Kentucky’s Catholics called their state “America’s Holy Land,” and the boy’s family was much at home there. The boy loved Sundays, and even as a youngster he enjoyed church in nearby Stanley where his mother still played the organ sometimes and a mysterious uncle he’d never known had once been priest. On Sunday morning, the boy would take off walking to Stanley, keeping to the road through fertile pastures and woodlands with trees full of songbirds. His family would pile into the bed of a wealthy neighbor’s Model T truck for the short drive. They’d usually pick him up before he’d gotten far, and he’d hold on to his father’s shoulders, stand in the truck bed and let the wind make his eyes water on the way to St. Peter of Alcantara. But this Sunday was different.

Maybe it was because the suit pinched his shoulders and was tight in the knees, but he felt uneasy that morning despite the familiarity of his Sunday walk. He turned away from the road and ambled toward the river. There, he found himself looking down at his canoe bobbing in the water. He was calmed a bit by the oddly pleasant vegetable smell of the riverbank and the sound of the breeze whispering in the reeds. He ran a hand through his hair, lifted a foot, hesitated, stepped with the foot into the canoe, lifted the other foot, lost his balance and fell into the river.

Weighed down by his suit and shoes, he had to make an effort to reach back through the water for the canoe. It wasn’t the river he feared, though, it was his mother. Rivers ruined suits, he figured, and the mishap might be his ruin as well. He kicked against the water, slung his arms over the canoe’s side and pulled himself in. Laying in the bottom of the boat, he wiped river water from his eyes and looked up at the empty blue sky. He wasn’t ready for his mother to see him or for his sisters’ laughter when they spotted him soaked and tousled. He reached across the bow of the canoe, untied it from its mooring and paddled into the current of the river.

As he floated past the sycamore and river birch, green ash and cottonwood along the banks, he could almost forget his blunder. He put down the paddle and took off his suit coat, wrung it out, and laid it over the canoe’s yoke in the middle of the boat. The canoe had turned slightly in the current as he did that, so he straightened it using the paddle as a rudder.

As he came out of a big curve in the river, he saw a shape beneath the trees on the bank. It was a bear, a black bear sipping water from the river. The boy thought black bears had been gone from Kentucky for decades, and for a moment he doubted what he was seeing. Then the bear looked up with its brown eyes, water dripping from its snout, and stared back at him, dipping its head to the side in its own gesture of mild surprise. The current was carrying the canoe downriver, so the boy began paddling against it to keep even with the bear, which wasn’t fifteen feet from him.

This is a contemporary view of the bend in the river around which waited the bear.

The morning sun was high enough to sprinkle sunlight through the trees on both creatures. Its thirst satisfied, the bear rose on its hind legs, twitching its cup-like ears slightly forward and swaying back and forth in a little dance. It nodded its head almost in rhythm to the boy’s paddling. Taking the gestures for bear-talk, the boy bobbed his head up and down in response. And so it went, the boy and the bear on the riverside. Neither one knew how much time went by before the bear dropped to all fours, stood still as a mountain for a moment and contemplated this boy who was looking back at him like a brother. Slowly, it turned its body from the river and moved off into the woods.

The boy never saw the bear again, and as far as he knew no one else in Kentucky ever saw it either. He thought that was a good thing for the bear’s well-being, though for the rest of his life he wondered if the bear ever saw another boy.

The suit wasn’t ruined after all, and the boy accepted in good faith the scolding he earned for missing Mass that day. A few years later the family moved away to the city as the Depression took its toll on small Kentucky farmers.

This is based on a true story told to me by my father, the boy. Liberties were taken with the tale. He likely took some, and I took some more. I was telling something different, when, like the boy who one day went down to the river instead of church, I kicked dust on my shoes to make them respectable and went a different way, because, you know, “they just don’t come no better than a bear.” Steven Fromholz wrote that. Lyle Lovett sings it here.