A river of reckoning

Back home, it’s just “the river.” I was born about a mile from its sandbar banks in Dardanelle, Arkansas, and I’ve never lived anywhere that’s more than a 30-minute drive from watching tugboats muscle massive barges through Dardanelle Lock. The river is where we baked in the August afternoon sun while setting up camp and woke to a sopping wet sauna the next morning. It’s where scuba divers brushed up against catfish “big as cars,” or at least that’s what the old-timers at the bait shop told me.