Dallas, TX (star^*)

        The last 3, 4 days, ¿where am I? , have been so wonderfully draining and full of moments that I will not forget. Seven guys set out to set up camp, sit and settle thoughts within themselves in order to set things right with the entire group. We camped by the Morris Sheppard dam, Possum Kingdom Lake, which is an impressive ~50 foot concrete god, displaying a power to hold back the extreme force within the other side of the lake. The area we camped was the low side of the dam, where the Brazos river comes back to life. The valley was decorated with signs that read something like
"WARNING! In the event of a dam release, this area will flood. You will have two minutes to evacuate after the alarm sounds."
         We talked about our procedure for evacuation, but none of it serious. In hind-sight, making it out of the brush and surrounding river in two minutes would have been somewhere between physically unlikely and increasingly doubtful, but I am somehow still altogether certain we would have made it, most of us. The night was full of the kind of merriment you would expect at a "bachelor party" camp out. There were home made beers. There were songs anyone would love to remember, but that no one could possibly contain. There were laughs so hard that our stomachs almost ripped, cigars that make you look cooler than Teddy Pendergrass drinking a milk shake in a snow storm. There were hot dogs.

      Day two. Hang overs mixed with the desperation of friends trying to raise each others' spirits when their own is wimpy and wobbly. As it happens, all we really needed was to get into our canoes and into the glorious cold water, because once we were on the river, the current seemed to pull us straight up from the muck. We paddled, but mostly discussed the best way to paddle, being that none of us are experts. We blocked the sun with all of our might. And we drank beers, but mostly discussed the coming doom that was the empty bottom of the plastic cooler. About midday, we were 3 miles down the river and many beers deep. Seventeen miles to go until we finish, so we will try to camp somewhere along the way. Late in the evening, we were at two-thirds of the way down the river, running out of daylight, and completely out of beer.
       The sun is going down behind the hills, and we did exactly what anyone who was exactly like us would do at that exact moment, we decided to skip camp and paddle to the finish no matter what. We knew we would be traveling through midnight, we knew it would be dark, and we knew it would be troublesome. We were right. Every 10 minutes you were lucky if you had not banked up on a shore, only to have to push yourself back and feel for deeper waters. No sounds, other than all of us trying not to sound a bit frightened. The potential for snakes, and the company of many many flying, biting bugs. We did make it of course, and without any serious repercussions. The canoes were flooded. All of us lost items that we never really needed, and all of us lost even more of what we did not want.