“I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: If you don’t believe in magic, you’ll never find it.”

T’morrow morning, an old boy named Jamie Patrick is gonna jump in the Sacramento River just a little bit south of Redding....he’s gonna swim downriver to Sacramento....He sez long swims help him relax...that’s about a hundred ‘n ten miles so he ought’a be really relaxed when he gets down here...he’ll be wearing a wet suit becuz the river is cold ‘n polluted...

Rivers are always polluted, some more ‘n others cuz even when you don’t have people around, you got all them other animals...but people are the main polluters...we’ve always used rivers as natural sewers under the belief that they cleanse themselves...’course, we learned that where rivers flow into lakes, the lakes are polluted ‘n now we’re doing a bangup job of polluting the oceans also...

Anyways, back to river swimming....I grew up on the Ohio River ‘n taught m’self to swim....well, it wuz either that or drown..ever’one I knew swam in the Ohio River...Hobo Cooper swam the Ohio once when it was flooded becuz he spotted a loose sailboat on the other side...when he got to it, he discovered it was a 5’ model sailboat but since he was there, he brought it back...I’ve often wondered what he ever did with it...we wandered the riverbank a lot back in those daze, mostly upstream as far as Fullerton ‘n sumtimes, South Shore, so anywhere from a mile to two miles...we’d grab a log ‘n jump in the river ‘n swim back to Beattyville Landing...back then there wuz lots of stuff floating in the river but during the war, all the diesel fuel ‘n such went to the military so the river boats all went back to wood ‘n coal...we still had the big old sternwheelers in those daze ‘n Beattyville boyz tho’t it wuz great fun to swim in behind them ‘n ride the wake....well, it wuz hard times back then ‘n kids had to amuse themselves...

I can’t imagine a better time to have grown up in ‘n sumtimes feel sorry for children t’day....’course, these are the ‘good ol daze’ for kids t’day....

“Everyone wants better. No one wants change...”