Downed Before the River Downed Before the River Summer ...

Summer always made me feel ashamed. You have to have friends to take part in summer. That was one thing I learned from the commercials: Friends were what entitled you to drop into lakes from tire-swings or play volleyball on a beach. And I had managed to talk myself into a solitary sulk that looked set to endure at least as long as my life.

Other, happier rejects scorned or pretended to scorn the bliss portrayed on commercials. I never could. I believed fervently in its reality and my exclusion from it. I was a Calvinist of fun: I knew I was damned. Because, for a California adolescent, failing to have fun was not just unpleasant?it was a mortal sin. The only one.

As the damned always do in Calvinist theology, I writhed and wriggled, trying to find a way out of my predestined misery. As our mild rainy winter turned into long, hot summer, I would look out at the puzzling landscape of the suburb in absolute bewilderment. Nothing was moving on the street. The fun people were already somewhere having fun.

I had only one clue. Fun involved other people and bodies of water. The water connection seemed very important. In every image of fun, there was an ocean or lake or river. And that connection dragged my thoughts to my one fun vehicle, the battered aluminum canoe that lay in our backyard among the clumps of dead yellow grass. I'd bought it with Doug and Scott Kirkland, my last friends, two brothers who lived across the street from us. Five years ago, we'd paddled it down the Russian River, with Doug, the oldest, at the stern, Scott in the middle and me in the bow.

It hadn't been a happy voyage. Doug developed Bligh-like tendencies, and with his strategic position in the stern was able to enforce them. So after five days before the mast, I never wanted to speak to Doug again. But Scott, the easygoing younger brother, was still up for canoe trips. He'd said so. So I gathered courage, went across the street and rang the Kirklands' doorbell, stepping into someone else's house for the first time in years.

Scott was hard to talk to. I was rusty too. It was an awkward summit. But when I reminded him we still had the old canoe and suggested we canoe the Trinity River in the far Northwest of California, he was for it. He had that gaunt mountain-man look that the hippie girls liked, and felt an ideological debt to the wilderness. He pretty much had to go.

I was providing the car, or rather my parents were. I informed them of this fact in my usual snarl, and though my father sighed something about needing it on those days, a few minutes of louder snarling was enough to make them both see reason. I heard them worrying over it from my bedroom that night, but shrugged off the spasm of guilt. Fun was a moral imperative.

Saturday morning, Scott and I took off. The first fifty miles were notably silent, until we went over a high bridge, where the canoe wanted to take wing. We were reduced to holding it down with aching fingers. That broke the ice, all too well. Scott mentioned a girlfriend, which left me sick with envy. Apparently she was European too, which made it worse. Fun became an even grimmer imperative: We must canoe that river! I must infiltrate barbecues and beach-volleyball games, and not now but five years ago!

We'd come most of the way up California's Central Valley, and the land was rising, red dirt and dry grass, clumps of Live Oak. And it was getting hotter. The big, old cop-surplus Plymouth was having trouble. I had no idea what kind?we were both proud of our ignorance of such sordid details, mass-produced Bohemian imbeciles that we were?until the idiot light came on reading: TEMP.

We pulled over and stopped. We stood by the Plymouth, watching steam come from the sides of the hood, listening to the cars go by.

Scott suggested we open up the hood. After five minutes or so, I found the hood release. The radiator was in front?that I knew. There was a cap on it, and Scott hinted politely that he thought you were supposed to unscrew it and put water in.

I looked at the radiator cap. It said, very clearly, "Closed System?Do Not Open." I pointed this out to Scott. He said, "That's weird," then ventured, "I'm pretty sure you're supposed to put water in there."

I said, "It says, 'Closed System.' It says you're not supposed to open it."

He shrugged politely, his duty done.

I was panicking?more than usual. I walked around the car twice and said, "Let's go on."

Scott shrugged politely again. With plumes of steam streaming behind us and the engine screaming, we made it to the next exit and pulled into the first garage we saw, where I stammered out the problem to a mechanic.

I see now that he couldn't believe we were as dumb as we were. He thought we must be describing some arcane variant on the overheating scenario, because he finally said, "Well? Start 'er up and let's see."

I did what I was told. The engine started, then rose and rose in volume into the nastiest scream I've ever heard: 350 cubic inches of Detroit iron fusing itself into a single meteor-like lump of molten metal. The Plymouth was dead on the table.

For two nights we slept in the car until my poor father came to get us in our remaining Plymouth?the purple ex-cop car, mourning its dead mate. Halfway home I managed to blurt something like an apology to him.

We never even saw the river.