Vibrant pools shimmered bright against their limestone boundaries. an unusual blue, a clear blue, like water in a cerulean vase. The strata angled down into the earth, long parallel lines with cactus tufts in the cracks like geriatric ear hair. We peeled our clothes off during the first scrabble over the rocks, past the “tree of life” with its magic spring, and the rock that will never fall poised behind a v-shaped crevice. a young couple watched the entry-points of their cast lines for ripples. We backtracked to a cave with a floor of water, and I felt a rush in my stomach. You wanted to go swimming but i wasn’t ready. My uncertainty echoed back to me from that dark place with a hollow sound.

The riverbed stone was worn smooth by water, or crunched to glittering mulch. In my palm, rocks of different sizes and colors: blood red, a thin black plectrum, a white shell with purple veins, a glossy grey, a mustard yellow fragment, a quartz. The white cypress trees dipped their gnarled root fingers into the river’s edge. They hosted cardinals, which flitted into the scene and regally turned their necks as if to pose for a postcard. In the stagnant parts: frogs the size of thumb tacks, newly spawned.

Part of a collective memory with families, long-haired men with unshaven faces and koozies, an Indian family wading through the knee-deep water with their day clothes soaked through, screaming kids and frantic dogs paddling towards land, coughing up water with a tennis ball clenched in the teeth.

Sleek beige lizards moved over the rocks like the reflection of sunlight from a watch face that catches the eye, and ants carried dead centipedes to a hole somewhere in the tall grass. Translucent fish wander past water-wrinkled feet when still. A snakeskin curls around a cypress with a long thick trunk, which ran along the ground before diverging theatrically, like a wrist pressed against a forehead before a fainting spell. The skeleton of a ten pound trout lay defeated in a hole on the shore, the victim of untimely drought. Its scales were scattered across a stretch of mud like little crumbs of death. Horseflies nipped the flesh.

We sat in the cavity of an exposed boulder in the river, eating peanut M&Ms and sorting our specimens on its back. The sun sets for us from an overlook in Dripping Springs, and we picked wildflowers, tying them together with a piece of grass, like hill country primitives. When the sun left us, its purple specter remained imprinted on our vision, even when we closed our eyes. Behind the horizon, its exit looked like a hellfire blazing. We thank the sun for warming us when we stood up in the water, and the earth for forming rock with millennial patience. We thank the moon and the stars. An entire day of earth and water, life, light and time. And how small my room would feel. I dreaded it.

We travel because it makes our world a little smaller, and because the swollen contours of the soul remain. A new self is made. Each day is an effort to eliminate fear and to know and love the world.