A SUMMER VOYAGE

WHEN one summer day I bethought me of a voyage down the east or
Pepacton branch of the Delaware, I seemed to want some excuse for
the start, some send-off, some preparation, to give the enterprise
genesis and head. This I found in building my own boat. It was a
happy thought. How else should I have got under way, how else
should I have raised the breeze? The boat-building warmed the
blood; it made the germ take; it whetted my appetite for the
voyage. There is nothing like serving an apprenticeship to fortune,
like earning the right to your tools. In most enterprises the
temptation is always to begin too far along; we want to start where
somebody else leaves off. Go back to the stump, and see what an
impetus you get. Those fishermen who wind their own flies before
they go a-fishing,--how they bring in the trout; and those hunters
who run their own bullets or make their own cartridges,-- the game
is already mortgaged to them.

When my boat was finished--and it was a very simple affair--I was
as eager as a boy to be off; I feared the river would all run by
before I could wet her bottom in it. This enthusiasm begat great
expectations of the trip. I should surely surprise Nature and win
some new secrets from her. I should glide down noiselessly upon her
and see what all those willow screens and baffling curves
concealed. As a fisherman and pedestrian I had been able to come at
the stream only at certain points: now the most private and
secluded retreats of the nymph would be opened to me; every bend
and eddy, every cove hedged in by swamps or passage walled in by
high alders, would be at the beck of my paddle.