Along the Eno

The Eno is a river a few miles north of us; part of its course is a state park where you can walk along riverside trails. I and the most beautiful woman in the world took a walk along the Eno's banks Monday, a fine way to spend the last day of the Memorial Day Weekend.
We saw turtles, old brick structures [an old pump house, not pictured), snakes and wonderful rock formations.
The day was mild and I would have had no exertion except for my need to carry binoculars, camera, and Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology, a Bible, Basil Buntings Poems, and a sketchbook in my blue "Tampa Maid" bag. Plus I was over dressed: the better to ward off unwelcome insect pests and their pesky bites. Jami traveled light and expressed some concern that I might be better off without the blue bag; that I might be cooler wearing shorts and a t-shirt. But no, veteran of riverside excursions me, I sauntered on.
The Eno is a beautiful river to walk along. Its waters are easy going, with great placid stretches. Today we walked to Bob's Hole. Previously we'd visited Bobbit's Hole, a wide place in the river, with gurgling rapids downstream. When we saw it, Bobbit's Hole seemed a magical place. We sat for a while on a bench the park provided along the bank. Bob's hole, perhaps would offer some of the same wonder.
We walked along the river. We crossed under the bridge to the road. We picked our way through rocks along the bank while traffic rumbled speedily overhead. Some stretches of river are full of algae, and green sprigs of grass and trees sprout from sandbars. At one point we saw a fish, alone, swimming upstream beside the bank. Mostly we saw turtles, holding their place against the current. Straddling a fallen tree in our path, Jami saw a small frog, invisible almost as it nearly matched the ground cover in texture and color.
The light bounced off the river and shimmered on the underside of overhanging branches, and its dull opaque surface was broken by amber shadows that revealed the bottom's rocks and sand. Whenever I looked back I saw that the trail was different in its aspects and mystery - so much so that I wondered if I'd noticed anything at all.
We crossed Pea Creek, a small tributary strewn with rocks. Jami nimbly crossed from rock to rock, while I took a more circular route where rocks seemed closely spaced. As I crossed the Pea I thought about a time 28 years ago when I hiked deep into the Rockies at the continental divide. Tenderfoot that I was, I made quick work of rocks across streams and at one point jumped across a small gap in a beaver dam. At the time I only had 150 pounds on my 5'10" frame. Now with 238 lbs. and 48 years old, I considered how much limberness I'd lost to time. At one point I handed Jami the Tampa Maid bag and hunched from one rock over another braced like a sumo wrestler, pivoting my leg over the gap. My leaping days are behind me.
If we're ever attacked by zombies or velociraptors I'm toast.
Not far from where we forded the Pea, we clambered up a rock, and as we stopped, I looked down at the river and saw a snake, brightly colored and lazing in the shadowy current. I have no idea what it is, but I'm sure it's poisonous, a copperhead or water moccasin, perhaps [ Jami informs me today, 5/29/2008, after checking the NC extension site and Wikipedia, that it's an Eastern Milk snake, and that it eats mice and other snakes - not poisonous]. It was beautiful. We took photos, messmerized. Later Jami would describe it as a foot long and I would aver that it was 5 feet, at least. I'm sure that it's in the middle.
As we continued up and down this exposed rock, I thought about how snakes like to sun themselves on rocks such as this.
Eventually we made it to Bob's Hole. It was a wide place on the river, but it lacked the charm of the Bobbit Hole. It did have a wonderful rock at one end, white and root tangled, standing 20 feet out of the river on the bank. The park provided no bench; no campsite was nearby. A small bed of rocks gurgled at the entrance to the hole.