Posted October 01, 2002

My second trip down the Eleven Point River in Missouri, we made a side trip before we went back home. The upper reaches of the Eleven Point are passable by canoe in the Spring and Fall, but below Greer Spring the river is navigable all year long; and even at the height of summer, its waters are so cold that you only have to trail your wrist in the water to cool off your whole body. My first trip down, I was going to go for a swim after we'd set up camp. "It's cold!" Jim had warned me.

"Great!" I'd exulted, feeling so hot I could never cool down. I believed it when I jumped in, but I've never clambered up a bank that quickly before or since as I dashed out of the frigid water.

I wanted to see the spring that fed the river.

I was tired already when I began the hike into the rocky forest, and ready to start asking "are we there yet?" long before we reached our goal. Then we began to hear the roar of the water up ahead. The valley we were walking through narrowed, so that we were hiking into a leafy defile with the broad stream plunging through it, its bed growing rockier and narrower as we passed, its waters growing white, as I remember it. The path itself grew more narrow. Or rather, there was less and less "shoulder" on my right between my feet on the mud-smeared rocks and the sounding stream, and I came closer and closer to the fern-clad valley wall on my left.

Then we rounded a bend and stopped in awe. It was as if we were standing at the bottom of a cauldron. The roaring of the water reverberated between the valley walls, until we had to bring our heads close together and shout to hear each other, until the relentless sound itself was exhilarating and stupefying. The surface of the spring was ten or fifteen feet across, with a seething center endlessly roiling. It sounded as if there were another spring further on, feeding this one, but the rocks were slick beneath our feet already, and the noise of the spring alone was making me a little dizzy, and we contented ourselves with the marvel at hand. Everything was lush around the spring, the air was moisture-laden and invigorating, and I felt a pang of sorrow I'd brought no token to offer the miraculous water. If I shut my eyes now, I have a dim sense of dripping rock-walls fringed in ferns; but I can recapture the sense of the damp air in my lungs, as if I were breathing in the vigor of the Earth herself.

But it was a long drive back home, and we had to get back. Jim led the way, and I picked my way slowly, feeling more tired with every step away from the vigorous spring. I wasn't very sure-footed at the best of times, and I was in no hurry to leave the cool haven of the spring for the hot car and the journey back, especially not when a misstep meant falling from the path into the rushing water and being swept along its rocky way. Watching my feet, I steadied myself against a sapling and considered my next step.

I started in pain as a yellow-jacket stung my arm. Poised between an unscalable bluff and the sharp drop-off above the white, roaring water, I still wasn't sure of my footing, and while I looked around in alarm I was hit by a flurry of more stings. I glanced upward and saw a paper nest in the top of the sapling, not ten feet above the ground.

I screamed and threw my arms over my head and hunkered down on the path.

Jim hurried back, afraid I'd fallen off the trail. When he saw me cowering under the nest, he shouted, "Run!"

"I can't!" I wailed, and after a few more cries of encouragement, he started toward me, bless his heart.

About that time the pain of the stings outweighed my fear of the terrain, and I scrambled to my feet and dashed away, letting Jim in for hornets he'd've escaped if I'd been doughtier to begin with.

We both ran for our lives. If I'd been paying attention, I could have told you where a hornet's territory ends, because somewhere between the spring and the car we lost the last of them.

I was hysterical by that time, and Jim wasn't in the best of spirits, but I'd calmed down enough to ask for a Pepsi when we filled up the car at the nearest gas station.

"Never mix the grape and the grain." I've heard.

I found out as an undergrad you should never mix the grain and the cactus, either.

But never, ever, mix hornet venom with caffeine!

It's odd, but the two stupefactions mix in my mind when I remember the spring, the mind-numbing grandeur of the gushing water, the nauseous stupor just short of unconsciousness brought on from the caffeine and the venom.

The spring was more edifying.

By Ruby Jung, even the background. All rights reserved to the story. If you like the background, you're welcome to copy and use it.