Today is another opportunity to take about a 6 mile venture in hiking boots close to home in search of whatever one might find along the river and railroad tracks right here in Reno, Pa. The sun is warm and terrific while the sounds of Canadian geese alert me from time to time. Sparkling rock attracts my eye as I catch the glimmer of something like pyrite or perhaps shocked quartz.
Whatever it is, that is for me an amazing find amid the gravel, piles of burned limestone, previously excavated sod and top soil, run-offs from the foothill streams emptying from under the highway and into the wide green waterway which once carried French and English boats up and down to Fort Franklin or Fort Machault in the 'formation years' of the colonies.
I look for small cannon shot but find none, although others have succeeded in the past. The glimmering stone comes home in my pocket. the river approaches the rail here and there, as the incline changes..."Pole the raft right, Nigger Jim!" (Huck Finn calls out as the sand bar comes into sight...Mark Twain would laugh at the Allegheny, but not me.)
I know that there are no beaches to softly allow one to step into the water, just a sharp drop and you're deep in trouble. I want to canoe the mass of water but not with any white man I know. Only a full blood Native American in total harmony communing with Ma Nature and the knowledge of survival will do! I trust no one else.
Walking along on this day I recall vividly talking the last time to Rita, one of my dearest pals of a lifetime. She was the only person willing and wanting to go out and do these searches on the hills and fields.
...."As soon as spring breaks, and winter melts off we can climb that hill on Hog Back and check out the old dump"...Rita would assert to me.
"Definitely! We won't put it off one more season."
"No, time is awastin' and life is short"...Rita offered back.
Rita who always had that short boy-hair cut with the black curls, a voice like a guy, a laugh that was real and warm and meant for everyone. We searched for lost dogs together in muddy-slushy roads, Rita in the damndest looking black shit-kicker farm boots and the boniest skinny knees showing.
...."Damn, Ree, you really have the worst knees i have ever seen!," I laughed.
"Yes, I guess I do!"
Looking up the track, it's as if her apparition greets me on this day without her. We missed our chance. When I had my back turned, her disease caught up to her, and snatched her away when I wasn't looking.
At her funeral viewing, little 'Ree' was lying there wearing a gray sweater and skirt that she would never have been caught dead in. But she was. The music playing was the usual drab mundanity meant to drive us to somber tones, so I called to the daughters and said that it just wasn't Rita. the music was aaallll wrong.
In a few moments, a tape of Elvis Presley was heard through the room.
The next day at the service, I was the last to arrive, coming from work. As I seated myself in the back to say farewell to Ree, the tape player came on again. One man and a hollow body acoustic guitar singing, "You are my sunshine, my only sunsine. You make me happy when skies are blue. You'll never know, Dear, how much I love you. Please don't take my sunshine away..."
My eyes cried like the rain. That was Rita.
There is a swamp area I am passing now here at the river; trees that clump togehter in the river bottom like cypress in the Everglades.
..."Rita, look at that? does it look like the Everglades to you?"
If she was here, she would answer in her down home dialect, "Shur duz! I reckon it's more like the Everglades than THEY are!"
And this day brings her back to me as I look at the adventures we had together and the ones we have to miss. But if that was her on the tracks, I speak to Ree again..."We will do this, my friend, soon. Soon, Rita, soon."
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