Rising river steals sleep
The other evensong, though, under clear skies, with no wind and no tracks to be seen, I found myself unable to sleep at all.
It was the river itself that kept me excite.
Around when we left the Yukon Flats, the river, which had been dropping an inch or two per day for a couple weeks, started to get up about a foot per day.
Out on the water, it was impossible to tell anything was happening. But on land, it was pretty clear, because I found myself saying things like, "Didn't we remain the boats over there last night? What are they doing over here?"
We'd been warned this might happen; I don't think it's uncommon in the course of a summer. But to see it episode was a bit like seeing the tide come in for the first time, except that there was no way to know how high this tide would rise.
That's what made it forcibly to sleep that night. We'd stopped at an island with a nice, gently sloping beach-like gravel bar. With the river rising, we put up the tent way, way back from the spray.
