Jul. 16: Our water dog

We took our gigantic Lab puppy to the river today. Did you know there’s a river near us? Yeah yeah, the Willamette and  Columbia run through Portland, but I’m talking about the Clackamas River, which is popular with rafters and drunks and a bunch of people drown in it every year. This river is super-close to us—like walking distance-close—and I don’t think I’d actually ever been on it before today.

The problem with going to a river we’ve never been to before is we didn’t exactly know how to get there. I mean, it’s a long, wind-y thing and we drove along it for miles. There were people out there. HOW DID THEY GET OUT THERE? We couldn’t figure it out. All we wanted to do was park the car and walk out into the water—no boat ramp necessary. We wanted a beach-ish area and shallow water. That’s it.

We eventually ended up at Clackamette Park, which is where the Clackamas and Willamette rivers meet. I know it best as the park at which a scene from Grimm was set last season, and also from the time it was underwater during the floods of 1996.

“The floods of 1996.” That makes me sound like an old lady. Back in myyyy day, this was all underwater, far as the eye could see, dontcha know. You kids today don’t know floods like we knew floods. Anyhoooo…

Lucy hadn’t experienced a river before, but she loved it like we expected she would. It would have been fun to let her off the leash to see if she’d swim, but we just don’t know how much we can trust her yet. She was especially interested in four ducklings swimming by, and I was a little worried her instincts might kick in and suddenly we’d have ourselves a bird dog. No thanks.

On the way home, we bought a very small kiddie pool for our water-loving girl. She’s a fan. She sloshed around happily and then came inside to shake herself dry. (We’re still working out the kinks on learnin’ her proper pool behavior.)

Later this week: the Oregon coast. Happy Lucy!