She straightened her coat and dress. “Is that the end of my ride?” she asked with unconvincing indignation. “We barely made a quarter mile!”
Lee shook his head apologetically and smiled. “I guess I need more practice before I join the circus.”
“I’d say so,” Katie admonished. “I think circus riders can cross a tightrope on a bicycle.”
“But they don’t have a pretty girl distracting them,” he said, heart pounding both from exertion and the exposure of its intent.
Katie looked away. “I think they have a balance pole. You might try one of those.”
Lee conjured this circus image to avoid parsing her response. “How could they hold the pole and the handlebars at the same time? Maybe you meant a unicycle.”
She looked at the empty stretch of towpath ahead. “So what about your plan to watch the sunset?”
“The spot’s only a mile away. We can walk.” He leaned the bike against a young tree, then opened the tool compartment and pulled out the leg-irons he used as a lock.
“Who are you planning to arrest with those? They look like they fell off a chain gang.”
“I found ‘em at the war surplus store in Georgetown,” he said. “They work OK as a lock.” Both cuffs were open, so he clamped one around the top tube and the other around the tree. They fit with an inch or two to spare. He tugged the chain to make sure both cuffs were locked and propped the bike against the far side of the tree. “It’s Charlie’s bike, so I need to make sure some towpath drifter don’t ride off with it. I reckon we’ll be back before anyone decides to cut down that tree. You ready to walk?”
“The sunset won’t wait.”
He thought about offering Katie his hand but decided to wait. It was better to build up to that. They walked side by side through the slanting rays of early evening. He asked about her visit to the Glen Echo amusement park with Pete and her friend. The season was just starting and the roller coaster wasn’t open yet, but they rode the Carousel and tried the bumper cars on the new Skooter ride. And Pete had loved the Hall of Mirrors.
Alexandria was nice, Katie said, but not as interesting as Georgetown. One of the things she’d liked best was crossing the river from Georgetown to Rosslyn on the new Key Bridge. It seemed like the roadway was a hundred feet above the water, and you could see the Washington Monument and the Capitol presiding over the D.C. skyline to the east. Looking west you saw the tiny Three Sisters islands poking up from the middle of the river, and beyond them the tree-lined banks and the broad Potomac receding into the distance upstream.
When she occasionally boated with her father growing up, she said she always looked forward to the days they spent unloading in Georgetown. After visiting the paymaster’s office, her father would give Katie and her brother George two dollars each as payment for the run from Cumberland to Georgetown. Then Katie and George would go up to M Street, to the Candy Kitchen. Mostly they bought caramels and black licorice, but when it was really hot they bought ice cream and banana splits. That was when she was ten. After that Katie stopped boating so she wouldn’t miss school in the spring and fall. Cy and George quit school after eighth grade and worked on the canal during the season and around Williamsport during the winters.
Shortly after the towpath began to curve, Lee pointed to a narrow seam that carried a small spring down to the canal from the steepening berm. Past the drainage, the berm rose into wooded cliffs that looked out over the canal, the towpath, and river to their left through the trees.
“That little creek comes down the hill from Blockhouse Point,” he said. “So the 21-mile marker should be just ahead.” When they reached it, the apron of woods between the towpath and the river was only thirty feet wide. Lee helped Katie down onto the path to a cove-like eddy fringed by a sandy beach and thick sycamores leaning out over the water. The sun had fallen below the horizon and pale pink and orange streaks were emerging in the sky.
Shallow whitewater twisted through a field of low rocks in the center of the river. Lee pointed upstream past the rocks and a narrow island. “If you listen hard,” he said, “you can hear the rapids above that island. That’s Seneca Falls, though it ain’t really much of a falls. Just fast, shallow water. Above Seneca Falls is Dam 2, where the feeder comes in at Violettes Lock. And Seneca Creek, where I growed up, is less than a mile past Violettes.”
“I remember seeing rowboats and kids swimming when our boat crossed over Seneca Creek on the aqueduct,” Katie said. She sat down on a fallen trunk at the near end of the cove, facing the sunset with her feet on the sand. She gestured for Lee to join her and a little surge of pride rippled through his chest as he walked over.
“Did you do all your boating and fishing in the creek, or did you get out onto the river?”
“We’d do both,” he said. “Fish in the creek sometimes, or take canoes out under the aqueduct into the river. Come downstream and explore. We could pick our way through the rapids along the Maryland shore, then paddle home on the canal. There was a rope swing into the river from a tree just down the shore, near where that creek come down from Blockhouse Point. Or sometimes we’d pull our canoes up on this beach and carry ‘em up to the canal. We’d paddle to that gulch, leave the canoes on the berm, and follow the creek uphill into the woods. Climb up to the cliffs and look out at the river.”
He turned to look at Katie. She was staring at the colors of sunset over the water upstream, seemingly lost in thought. He waited for her to say something but she just turned toward him and smiled, which encouraged him to finish his story.
“The Union Army used to scout the river from these cliffs during the Civil War,” he said, looking back at the steep slope of the berm. “They’d try to stop the rebels from fording the river and raiding the canal. If the rebels could split the towpath and drain a level, that would cut the supply lines to Washington. So the Union built a blockhouse camp up there in the woods. Once my friend Raymond and me went exploring up there and found some old foundation walls near the creek. Raymond found a medicine bottle and I found a bayonet blade. I took it home and I still have it.” He turned toward Katie again and exhaled, happy to have shared his reminiscence. She was idly toeing an eyebrow-shaped arc in the sand.
“Did you ever find something as a kid that you kept and still have?” he asked.
She turned as if pulled back from a distance and her hand floated to the reddish sandstone pendant that hung against her breastbone. “I found this necklace on the riverbank when I was nine,” she said, her hazel eyes focusing intently on Lee for a second before drifting again. “I had never seen anything like it before. I remember thinking that it must be very old.”
“I ain’t seen anything like it either. I don’t know what to make of that symbol.”
“I was boating with my daddy that summer,” she said, “and there was a break in the towpath above Cabin John. It took them all day to repair it and we got stuck behind a line of boats waiting to get down through Seven Locks. We knew we was going to be there for most of the day, so Daddy let me and George go off to play after we finished taking care of the mules.
“We found a trail down to the river from the towpath…they’re not too close together at Seven Locks. So we followed it to a line of huge rocks in the woods near the water’s edge. The boulders were almost as tall as the trees. While George was trying to climb, I walked along the base of the rocks on a bank that got narrower as you went along. Then the rocks met the river, so I had to turn around. Walking back I saw a small, flat stone lying against the roots of a tree on the riverbank. It was tangled up in fishing line and tied to a piece of driftwood. When I picked it up and untangled it, I guessed it was a pendant or part of a necklace. I thought that it must have been made for someone and then lost.”