Robert Boswell

The opening to The Half-Known World:

I grew up on a tobacco farm on a county road that ran along a wooded ridge in western Kentucky. In winter, when the trees dropped their interference, we could catch glimpses of the Mississippi River from our car windows. Our town lay a few miles south of the farm, just below the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. It would have been the first town Huck and Jim passed after missing their turn that foggy night. In our neck of the river, the breadth of the Mississippi exceeded a mile. It was a wide, moody, muddy deity. “Everything makes its way to the river,” my father often said—once, I recall, on the occasion of our peeing together on the slope behind our shed.

My best friend lived on the same blacktop road. His name was Brady. He and I played together in the woods: cowboys and Indians, pirates and captains, the War Between the States—anything with a narrative. We had decided we would be writers when we grew up and we played in chapters, narrating in the third person, pausing to invent a new chapter heading whenever we reached a suitably mysterious moment. In the woods behind Brady’s house, we stomped out a network of paths and constructed a tree house that overlooked a creek. Brady suggested we ought to one day follow the creek all the way to the river. We agreed that it would make a beautiful story, but the woods were dense with brush and briars. We never hiked very far beyond the beaten paths.

Snow came every winter, but the winter Brady and I were in third grade it arrived early and was followed by a hard freeze. The creek became solid, its gray surface resembling marble more than glass. Brady opened a chapter with “At last they had a clear path to the river,” and we were off. Our narrative made us brave and neither of us was terribly bright. We set out on the ice for the great wide waters of the Mississippi.

We didn’t tell anyone our plan. It wasn’t part of the story.

Hiking on the frozen creek was unlike any of our other adventures. It was thrilling to be walking on water. It was also slippery, cold, and slow going. The ice made noises, as did the trees, and things beyond the trees we could not name. I did not at that time own sneakers. My school shoes had slick cardboard soles. I could slide long distances on the ice, but my feet were cold and I fell at regular intervals, as if to punctuate the stream’s winding passage.

The creek meandered so much that the hike of a few miles became an odyssey. Walking kept off the chill, except about our faces and ears, where we felt the sting. After a while it began to snow, a frail and hesitant fall. The gray sky turned to pearl as it approached dusk, hedging into darkness. As the air cooled, the forest sounds grew sharper. The wincing of overhanging limbs became ominous. If the adults who endured our disappearance that afternoon are to be believed, we hiked for four hours.

It seemed to us much longer.

Our story faltered now and again, but we did not let it slip away. I began to wonder what we would do when we reached the Mississippi. In my mind, the center of the river rose up higher than the frozen banks and was rounded on top like a great unsheathed vein. I imagined standing before that vast expanse of ice and water, snow and sky. My legs—or perhaps my character’s legs—wobbled at the thought. We were engaged with something enormous, I understood. I didn’t have the right words to express what it was, but I felt it.

The dark gathered density while we walked along, cheerful and exalted and on the brink of terror. I do not recall much of our story line, but I do remember that Brady identified a flaw in our body of work. We never had any girls in our stories.

“It just isn’t realistic,” he noted.

I reluctantly concurred.

By this time we had no chance of getting home before the dark became as solid as the ice. We had not brought a flashlight or matches. Our parents would have realized by now that we had disappeared. Still, we kept walking and telling our tale. There was very little pretend left in it. We announced our progress to ourselves. We speculated on the comely woods. Our breath shimmered in the evening air, the little clouds that stories make.