Swimming in Shangri-La

Dipping our feet in the river and sunshine.



Following our mountain down to it's beginnings will take you to the river.  During the winter it bloats, becoming irritable with the incessant rains that force it to gush into the raging pacific.  With the arrival of summer the river slows and calmly strolls itself out to sea.  It's waters shallow and the swimming holes warm.  Cindy and I rode the girls on it's banks on a quest to find "the path" that would lead us to the rumored Shangri-La swimming hole to swim the horses.  It took a few rides until we  found it.  It was a small, overgrown bridle path that led up the steep river's bank.  An abandoned dirt road met us at the top of the bank and led us beside the river.  We strolled through a tunnel of redwood trees with the river sparkling at us between their trunks. Eventually, we found a path that led us to a huge sand bar on the river. 


No traffic here.

Paradise!  That's all I can say.  No cars, no radios, no phones, no parking lots, no people...  Just Cindy, Syria, her dog Cassey, Me and Autumn.  There we were, all alone on a cobble rocked river wrapped around by forested mountains and and blue skies.  When we got over the stunning beauty of this place we took the horses to the edge of the watering hole.  Autumn was happy going in up to her armpits but that was it.  I slid off her back and swam in and called for her to come out...



First swim!

...and out she swam.  She blew little bubbles out as she horsey paddled across the swimming hole.  She would swim a lap, get out, come back in, roll in the shallow section, swim out...  She did this a few times and then when she got to the middle she decided to rest... and stopped swimming... and then... she sank.  Time drowned away from me as I watched her slip away from me without a single thing in the world I could do to save my best friend's life.  I can still remember her eyes looking up to me with the glass surface of the water sinking us further and further apart.  I grabbed her halter and pulled.  She began to struggle. Through her struggling she began to kick and then she instantly sprang up to the surface just like that!  She made it back to shore where she began to snort out water and tried to shake the water out of her flopping ears. I apologized for asking her to follow me out there.  I smothered her in hugs and kisses and told her I would never ask her to do that ever again. After a little while she  began to eat grass and that's when I knew she would be okay.

Poor girl!

I thought for sure that this would be the first and last time I'd ever swim with Autumn.  I would never blame her for being terrified of the water for the rest of her life. I was terrified!  As my heart was trying to make it's way back into my chest, Autumn made it perfectly clear as to what to expect in the future...



Autumn getting back in the saddle.



As I floated out in the swimming hole my amazing giant brave baby Autumn came back out in the water! She horsey paddled around me and after a bit she let me swim onto her back.  It's a funny thing to swim on a horse.  You aren't able to sit on their back with gravity holding you in place as it normally does when you ride on the land.  Instead, you sort of float above them.  All I could really do was just hold onto her mane and just sort of follow along with her.  I felt like her little angel floating above her (but an angel still riddled with the guilt of almost being her angel of death louring her to a watery grave a few minutes earlier).  She carried me up the bank and we dried in the sunshine of  paradise until it was time to go back up the mountain.

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