Waking With a Yelp

“He drifted on the water, the man dozing on the inner tube, and didn’t wake till he nudged the wall of scree and shattered rocks at the far end of the reservoir,” begins Drifting Toward the Rocks .

Not that there is much of a current in that little lake, formed by piling earth and broken boulders across the neck of a red-rock canyon. Just enough to coast him slowly, peacefully, inexorably down the hundred yards to the stone-littered hill of the dam—where he woke with a yelp and a startled leap at the touch of those sharp-edged stones.

In today’s “On the Square” article, Joseph Bottum moves from the story of a day spent at the lake with his daughter, and the painful experience of some poor man who enjoying the pleasures of the day had fallen asleep, to an insight into being a parent.