My son is at last of Tom, Huck and Becky age. I've waited for this all his childhood. This age, 10, is pre-adolescent but post-little kid helplessness. So when his buddy David came over the other day, I sent them outside to their tree house in the ponderosas behind our subdivision, thinking that Tom, Becky, and Huck would certainly spend time in tree houses and that the day was too beautiful to waste indoors.

The kids, however, spent about 45 minutes there. This did not fit my idea of woodsy adventure. Why weren't they stalking bears? Trying to trap squirrels? Didn't they know how blessed they were to have a swath of land available to them in which to construct tree houses? Disgruntled, I piled them in the car and said, "We are going to The River."
The River was roaring, but I thought we could find a little beach where they could build castles and put their feet in. Chris' friend David, though, remembered a swing dangling from a tree, and after several lame attempts at beach-finding (all drowned by high water), we found the swing. Downstream from a popular boat launch, it dangled as a brazen invitation for good old-fashioned fun. Ah, I thought. Huck, Tom, and Becky would spend hours here.

I read the boys the riot act on Rivers In Flood. I told them not to go out past the mini-harbor over which the swing hung lest they be rapidly sucked downstream. I told them the cold would kill them quicker than anything provided they remembered to get on their backs and go feet first, as they knew good fallen rafters are supposed to do. I said, "This water was snow yesterday. Remember that."

Surprisingly, this did not freak them out. An earlier Chris might have cowered at such Fear-of-God talk. But an older Chris might have scowled at this motherly advice and rebelled in the face of it. This is why 10 is a perfect age. Both David and Chris merely nodded their heads, and set about reaching for a thin nylon rope hung on the end of the main swing. The main swing was a chain with a section of it threaded through a short pipe and hooked back on itself to make a triangular handle. They couldn't reach the handle, but they did reach the dangling green rope, and gleefully pirouetted out over the water.

David dropped in more than Chris, splashing into chest-high water and then shrieking out of it as the cold hit him. But Chris went in too, and then a trio of mid-high school age kids showed up. Two boys and a girl. Tom, Huck and Becky! The younger boys watched in awe as one of the older ones grabbed the metal triangle, flung himself far out over the river, did a back flip off of it, and plopped into the water. Quick imitation ensued, especially on David's part. He asked to be hoisted up onto the main swing, and he too spun out over the river, though he did not do a back flip or (thank God!) plunge into the deeper parts. Watching them, my thoughts meandered from TV shows to The Who, and I thought then that the kids were all right. They were all right because this public territory of swing and river was all right too - unchanged, really, from Twain's own river reality. How nice to feel that, and to suspect that underneath all our depletion of resources and fiendish desire for private property, that what nurtures us most is river swings and boat launches and tree houses, available to the Tom, Huck and Becky in us all.