“Here we are,” I said to us, as most of us stopped out in the middle of the Mississippi river and gathered ourselves into a half-circle with our faces looking toward one of the shores where our camp director had a camera waiting to take our picture.
Standing there, squinting my eyes in the direction of the camera and also in the direction of the sun, I happened to remember a brand new Paul Bunyan story which Poetry had made up once and which you maybe know about if you’ve read “The Sugar Creek Gang Goes North,” and it was, that Old Babe, which is Paul Bunyan’s blue Ox, was swimming in the headwaters of the Mississippi river and the blue began to come off in the water, and to make the water blue; and because the Mississippi flows through a lot of the lakes in Minnesota, pretty soon all the lakes became what is called “blue-watered lakes.”
Of course it was only a legend—Paul Bunyan, as you know, being a legendary lumberman who was extra large; and Babe, the blue Ox, being his best friend and went everywhere he went, just like a boy’s dog follows a boy around.
Anyway, while we were having our picture taken, I remembered the story Poetry’d told about how the lakes got their blue water, so I looked down quick at Poetry’s large feet and at all the seventy different-shaped and different-lengthed toes on the fourteen feet of all seven of us, and tried to think of something funny to say which I did, but which wasn’t very, and this is what it was—“If all the fish in the lakes up here get terribly sick and die before long, it’ll be because the barrel-shaped boy in our gang didn’t wash his feet before he waded across the Mississippi river.”
And that’s how it happened that I wished I had brought along a change of clothes, on account of for some reason what I said made Poetry peeved. He quick shoved his shoulder against me, and because I was standing in fast-flowing water half way up to my knees anyway, when I stepped sideways to try to get my balance I stepped on a slippery rock in the river bed, lost my whole balance and the next thing I knew I was sitting down on the bottom of the Mississippi river, the water coming clear up to my stomach.
Right away Barry pointed his camera in our direction and took another picture.
That reminded Poetry of a riddle which he quick asked and was: “Say, gang, what is it that stays in bed all day, spends all its time at the bank and never stops running?”
“A river,” Dragonfly said and sneezed twice on account of he is not only allergic to different pollens but to sudden changes of temperature—the water in that little narrow babbling stream being almost cold.
Well, that was all that happened on that trip, except one thing, and it was that one thing that helped make our next adventure, which was a fishing trip for walleyes, extraordinarily interesting and exciting.
Not having brought along any extra clothes, I had to walk in my wet trousers back to our station wagon, which wasn’t any too much fun for me. There they made me undress and lie down where I wouldn’t be seen while some of the gang wrung the water out of my trousers and also out of the tail of my shirt. I would have to wait till they dried enough for me to put them on, which meant I had to let the rest of the gang visit a very special curio shop without me, while my clothes were hanging on a limb in the sun. Poetry who was my almost best friend was already sorry I was all wet, and we made up as soon as I found out he was going to stay with me to keep me company.