Listening to Rivers
by Orman Day
The Ganges spoke to Siddhartha
about the path to enlightenment.
For two months, the Mississippi
told me to paddle, paddle, paddle.
Out of shape at age fifty-six, Orman Day quit his job to fulfill a boyhood dream sparked by Abraham Lincoln's flatboat voyages. With a female poet friend, he canoed the Mississippi from St. Paul to New Orleans. He had to turn himself into a beast of burden because contrary to misconceptions, he couldn't float downstream while catching catfish for dinner. By the voyage's end, he had grown a gray beard and was known as "Ol' Man River."
