distance of home. There were sunbathers on towels, touch football games, barbecues smoking, kids splashing in the river. I parked the camper by the restrooms, toward which Joe shuffled, old and spiritless. I walked down to look at the river. The little Naches gurgled prettily and unconcernedly through the bedlam, a thin, transparent, freestone trickle barely thirty feet wide and a foot deep. The park side was a lawn set on a wide grass plain on the inside of a immense geological curve in the river. The far shore was covered, as far as the eye could see, by an dense overhanging tangle of brush which carpeted right down to the water surface itself and extended over to mid river. There was no character to the thin water at all, every rounded stone of equal size, not one single eddy or break to signal a stoney protrusion, possible holding water for fish. It looked sterile, and lifeless. It might hold some planted trout for a few days after a hatchery truck went by. Kids ran into the water to splash as Joe joined me, apparently successful in his mission. Slurp. "There's nothing here, Joe", I announced. I stared awhile longer as Joe looked and studied the water, waiting for him to see and deduce what I had. Slurp. "It's too small for any fish," Joe said. "They ruined it with the park. Slurp. "We might as well go." Slurp. We both turned and started back to the truck. Slurp. I wheeled around. "Wait a minute!", I said. "What is that sound?" Slurp. "That's got to be a fish!" I ran back to the water's edge. Slurp. There was nothing to see, only the thin, flat water and the overhanging brush. Joe joined me in the searching. Slurp.
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