By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
sallies@juno.com

You'd hardly know this was a boat if you saw it only from the inside today.

Bird books lie open to black-crowned night herons. Richard Strauss's “Don Juan” is on Public Radio International, not the weather channel. My “Book of Major American Poets” is bookmarked at Edwin Arlington Robinson, but he's gloomy: “And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, Went home and put a bullet through his head.”

Indeed, many American poets are gloomy. Emily with her obsession with death. Poe with his. Robert Frost is reflective, my favorite to read aloud, but I return to Longfellow with his sweeping sagas and evocative portraits of nature: “The thrush that carols at the dawn of day From the green steeples of the piny wood....”

Dave is reading books on navigation instead of navigating, and I am writing about boat-travel instead of traveling. A series of thunderstorms chased us off the river yesterday. Didn't find a cove to our liking — everything here along the Tennessee is being built out in lavish estates, each with double boat house and rocketing water toys — until we ducked in behind an island and found a sheltered creek, deep enough and wide enough to let our little trawler swing to anchor.

Stayed through the weekend, intentionally avoiding the motorboat wakes that toss dishes out of their shelves. After riverbanks loaded with houses, this tree-fringed bay is strikingly rural. About half of it is a steep-sloping pasture where we noticed the bouncing approach of a small trailer loaded with dog crates.

Three happy speckled hounds are soon running and snuffing the Sunday air. An occasional lowing. A dozen tan cattle graze behind the trees. In the late afternoon they wade into the river to cool their bellies. Here in our boat-turned-studio, the only reminders that we're on water is the gentle rocking of wind-blown wavelets and the changing scene, as the stern swings first toward one bank, then the other.

A flock of wood duck hens and chicks has possession of a log back near the creek's narrow entrance. Earlier I watched a night heron getting a drink from the same log. The swallows drink on the wing, dipping to the surface then wheeling for another pass. Three boys are alternately fishing and sunning themselves like turtles on a dock at the eastern tip of the peninsula that forms this bay.

Finally one can contain his curiosity no longer — after all, we've been moored in his cove for nearly 48 hours — and climbs into a runabout, fires it up, guns it into a long spray-filled loop, then lets it slow, nose dropping, as he approaches. I don't know why we feel threatened when another boater comes toward us on the water. We've read too many horror stories of modern-day pirates and drug-runners in the Caribbean, I guess. In any case, the figure in the boat looks like a crazed murderer until he nears us, starboard to starboard, and grins.

“Nice boat,” he calls across the water between us. “I like it.” He's just a lanky high school boy, his backward baseball cap nodding in approval. I thank him, he circles behind us, and passes even closer on my left. “Yeah, I like it,” and he adds to his smile a thumbs-up before cruising back to his dock.

Last night we heard a couple of loud slaps on the water, beaver no doubt, although there's no signature of pointed stumps and inch-wide shavings like those on Peachtree City ponds. Now and then I sense I'm being watched. No alligators in this river.

I put the glasses on a wedge I hadn't noticed earlier on the surface. It's a turtle looking over the green interloper in his world. When he's seen enough, he slips below without the slightest ripple to show where he had cleft the water.

Sat out on the stern for several hours yesterday, reading, binoculars at hand, when a small brown and white butterfly landed on my book. The book was “Under the Tuscan Sun,” Frances Mayes' bestseller about buying and restoring an Italian villa, her descriptions of basic country food mouthwatering. It amused me to think the words gave off an essence a butterfly found attractive.

I was nearly to the bottom of a page, but put off turning it lest I startle him. I think he was a hackberry butterfly, although he had more “eye-spots” than the picture in our guide shows. He flattened his wings, then closed them over his furry back, then spread them again, all the while touching everything within reach with his unfurled proboscis.

I watched, fascinated, as he explored the page, then started slightly upon reaching my index finger. When nothing happened, he was emboldened to climb aboard, allowing me to finish the chapter. I called to Dave to come see. The little insect seemed perfectly content to ride my finger, and when I wanted to come in, required considerable persuasion to remain outside on a coil of rope.

We saw him over the next hour or more, clinging to the screen and watching us as we cooked spaghetti and shredded salad. Later when we stepped outside to check on some unfamiliar birdsong, the butterfly was nowhere to be seen.

Perhaps he'd flown across the water to dine where daisies spangle the meadow. Perhaps.

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