By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
sallies@juno.com

This is it. The best moment of the day, she thought, lifting her cup for a sip of coffee.

The sky is fresh and bright, the coffee just right, the cool breeze offset by the strengthening sun's rays. As the boat swung slowly around its anchor line, she could see most of the shore of the Tennessee cove where they'd spent the night, without turning from her seat in the stern.

She smiled and chided herself: About an hour ago, you said that was the best time of the day, lying in the warm cocoon of the bunk, watching the fog blow under the aft canopy. Its tendrils tapping silently on the window just heightened the pleasure of warm toes under multiple layers of blankets and sweatshirts in the cabin's 41 degrees. Then the sky drew back its shy foggy veil to show its purest blue. Hard to envision that the stars were still up there exactly as they were last night before the full moon whitewashed over them.

A trio of crows crossed the cove at treetop height, appearing to swim with steady wing beats, one giving the sentinel cry as he flew: Caaah! Caw-caw! In a few minutes the same three sounded like a pack of dogs on the scent of a fox, as they turned to drive away a soaring red-tailed hawk.

Contentment seeped into her pores with the sun. The silvery side of a fish dazzled briefly above the dark ripples pursuing or being pursued? The water did not allow the casual observer to learn its deeper secrets.

From inside the cabin came the sounds of dishes sliding into their rack, the coffee pot jangling into the pots-and-pans cabinet. Gradually the clatter gave way to the brooding slow movement of a Beethoven symphony on the University of Tennessee's public radio station. We can leave whenever you want, he said, stepping into the cockpit, or we can just stay here all day if you're enjoying it.

She asked for, and got, a little more time. To anticipate the day, she thought, or maybe to forestall the spending of this last day on the river. After nearly a month, she knew the day still held more "best moments," the more to be cherished for their also being the last.

Funny how pleasure is enhanced by its opposite, she thought, like the bunk's snug warmth by the cold surrounding it, or the fading starlight by the morning fog. She grieved pulling away from these banks that show no sign of human incursion, where Virginia creeper sends a flame up a tree trunk, and where, one morning, an impossibly tiny doe came to the beach to drink.

But the moment of departure was such a triumph, as she thought of her husband pulling the anchor loose while she applied power, the boat finally taking its head and breaking free of its restraints, heading out to open water.

What will this day bring? A close encounter with a bald eagle flying so low across the bow she could see its yellow eye assessing them as it flew? Searching out and finding a daymarker necessary to identify the entrance to a wildlife management area? A glimpse of wood ducks in grassy banks? Perhaps a barge-sighting, less common now that lock repairs had interfered with scheduling, but always a spectacular demonstration of one man's skill maneuvering thousands of tons of ore on a wandering current.

She looked forward to the day even as she regretted leaving the morning. The music from inside was building to the conquering burst of the tenor's message Freedom! and she could hear the faint chirp of navigational instruments being set and checked. A shadow swept over her; the irritated gronnkk! of a great blue heron echoed.

A single burgundy leaf spiraled from a sweetgum to the water's surface, done with its summer job manufacturing food for the straight trunk and roots that had supported it. The sweetgum couldn't know that it is doomed. The same action of wavelets and wakes that cuts away cliffs, exposing caves and sheaves of stone stacked high up the bluffs, also erodes the bank where trees reach outward for sunlight. In another season, the sweetgum's grasp on the earth will loosen, and one windy night it will topple into the water to begin its next existence as a fish habitat until it finally returns to soil where unborn grasses will lodge and send down stabilizing roots.

A tiny wisp of cloud drifted into the blue field over her head. One life, one morning, one moment cycles into the next, she thought, opening the clattering wooden doors and stepping into the boat's cabin. The symphony had been replaced by a spirited Bach fugue which yielded to a commentator and then the news.

What she heard of new conflicts and dead sailors was so much like the Tom Clancy she'd been reading, she felt a jolt of confusion: Which was fact, which fiction?

I guess it's time to go, she said.

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