The riverbed is paved with stones polished round and smooth. A thin frosting of silt is settled over and around those stones that rest below the line of the low tide, where the waves ebbing and flowing cannot wash them clean. You step in at low tide and the muck just beneath the surface will suck your shoes off your feet.
On the industrial banks and in the marshes that border the river, where low-value trees and shrubs wet their roots, trash collects, blue plastic drums and empty soda bottles and chunks of dirty white styrene foam.
You see none of this from the middle of the water, out in the channel where large red and green buoys mark the limits for shipping traffic. On a November afternoon, you see ripples from the wind blowing obliquly from the south, crossing the current. You see a speed boat or two and, far down the fetch, a white sail.
You hear the lapping of the water against the boat's bow, coming at you from inside the cavern that is the little cuddy cabin, and when the breeze stiffens, you hear the hum of the cable that holds the steel centerboard suspended below the hull, a stringed instrument whose tone suggests power and purpose.
You feel the breeze on every exposed hair: On the back of your neck, on your stubbly cheek whiskers, your long, aging gray eyebrows, the thin filaments rising from the withered, nicked old skin on the back of your hands. The hairs tell you direction, strength.
In the wood of the tiller, you feel the tug of the water against the rudder that slices the river three feet deep, feel the straining and the easing as the sails fill and flutter, and somehow, in combination with the signals being transmitted through your neck hairs, your fingers use the report from the tiller to keep the little boat pointing carefully along the optimal line, aiming across that current that would drive you back to the dock.