Up A Lazy River

O, Perfect Day

Up a lazy river in the noonday sun

Throw away your troubles, dream with me.

I'm floating along in a tube up Lazy River, an attraction in the 22-acre Zoombezi Bay water park. It is a splashy sanctuary touting 200,000 gallons of water enveloping me in 850 feet of calming twists and turns.

I'm comfortably snug atop a colorful, jouncing inner tube, letting her buoy me up wherever the current wants her to. Like Huck Finn, I'm thinking, there warn’t no home like a raft after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft. 

Dangling my leg in the water, I pretend that I have lit a pipe, but unlike Huck I decide to keep my trusty suit on. I glide down, thinking about my trip down the waterway. 

Then, I close my eyes imagining that nightfall has come. In the moonlight, I'm floating, singing, and laughing. It is a peaceful, undisturbed journey. I ignore the noise and deem that everything is perfectly still - not a sound anywhere, as if the whole world were asleep.

I'm reckoning that two or three days and nights have gone by. I might say they have swum by, sliding along so quiet and smooth and lovely. My raft moves with the flow of the water, constantly pushing me to new, unseen places as the days and nights simply blend together.

I get a delightful sense that I'd lost my identity, but it's okay. I'm too deliciously warm and lazy to bother regaining my visibility.