I look back at bursts of joy over daisy chains and bird feathers and butterflies and cats. These were the textures of bliss. And now I see how my eager heart must have demanded that such innocent raptures of childhood be repeated for the rest of my life, like playing a phonograph record over and over. On summer Sundays, we often skipped church and went to the lake. Kentucky Lake was a man-made lake—one of the world’s largest. It had a hydroelectric dam that was a marvel. The Tennessee River had been dammed to create the lake, a federal project intended to bring cheaper electricity to an isolated region and to control flooding. You could go down inside the dam, into a spooky tiled tunnel where there were gargantuan turbines. Most people in the region had never seen a subway tunnel or a skyscraper or even an escalator, so this engineering feat was celebrated. Mama and Daddy and Janice and I drove for an hour to a strip of rocky beach that we had almost to ourselves. Country kids didn’t learn to swim in any formal way—lessons or school teams.
