IT WAS JUST AFTER OUR KAYAK FLOATED PAST THE IRRIGATION PUMP sucking water up onto the golf course that we determined there was a man overboard. Or, more accurately (and more horifically), there was a polyester rabbit, a stuffed animal, at large in the tranquil, suburban basin of Oregon’s Tualatin River.

"Bunny!" shrieked Allie, my daughter. Allie is in kindergarten and missing one front tooth, which she yanked out herself. Bunny is her most constant companion, the one thing that travels with her between her mother’s house and my own. "Bunny is not in the boat!"

I saw her, upstream. Something fluffy and brown was floating up there and I began paddling toward it, desperately. I had already lost Bunny once on this river, when she sank to the bottom on an earlier reconnaissance mission, and I’d saved myself only by lying. "The fish lifted her up," I told Allie days later, as I bestowed upon her a new mail-order rabbit. "The Easter Bunny washed her." Allie courteously bought this fiction, but now her patience was thinning—and so, actually, was the brown fluff on the water.

"Allie," I said, "that isn’t Bunny—it’s foam."

"Bunny!"

I paddled ashore, pushed as rapidly as one can in a $129 inflatable kayak that is leaking and laden with cook pots, cans of propane, and waterlogged coloring books. Bunny, it turned out, was in the bilge water right beneath my canvas seat. I wrung her out, flicked the twigs off her back and gave her to Allie.
Allie hugged Bunny. "Can I have a marshmallow?" she said. "Because that was really scary."

I gave her two marshmallows, and then I collapsed, exhausted, onto the bank. We were 10 hours (and six river miles) into a mission that was both serious and absurd. Allie and I were attempting to blaze a new trail through the wilds surrounding our Portland home. Our aim was to travel 72 miles solely by public transit and boat. We would eschew the automobile; we would discover anew the splendor of own bioregion. We would spend a night camping under the stars. We would wrap our deflated kayak in clothesline and take the number 14 bus from our doorstep to the MAX train to the 57 to narrow Rock Creek, and then would then paddle a mile to the Tualatin, which would carry us, after two days, to the 38 bus which, in the goodness of time, would finally deliver us back to the familiar 14.

All family vacations entail some element of calamity, of course, but this was different. This was real adventure. In truth, it was a test of my bond with Allie, a bond that sprouted, really, when she was one and I moved out, into a place so cramped that, from inside her crib, Allie could make music by batting at the keys on my fax machine. Since then, she and I have never constituted a normal family but we have nonetheless had a high time. We have danced barefoot—and without shirts—on the cool dirt floor of my basement and gone swimming at midnight and picked blackberries, eating them until our stomachs were sour and our faces purple with juice.

Now, on this warm Saturday in May, nature was growling at us. Rock Creek, which trickles through a series of affluent neighborhoods, is a torture chamber of fallen logs. Covering its last mile that afternoon took five hours. We portaged 11 times. At one particularly knotted clump of gray, curlicued tree roots, I had to move the gear through the skin-shredding brambles in six stages—now to this knobby branch, now to this tiny patch of dry mud—and to simultaneously restrain Allie from collecting rocks on the creek bank. ("Allie, no." "But, Daddy, I’m five-and-three-quarters." "No!") At another point, I found it easiest to frogkick my legs in the water and clench the tent in my teeth as I propelled Allie and the boat between logs.

If anyone peered down at us from their patio, they might have regarded us as ghosts, as phantasms forced to endure purgatory right in their midst. But we crossed paths with no one. We moved through Rock Creek in eerie solitude and then, at its terminus, Allie climbed out of the boat and slathered herself in mud and ran at me, jaggedly, her hands high over her head in triumph.

I should have felt content; instead I was anxious. It was seven o’clock now, and the spring air was cooling and our matches were wet from the portages. We were still ten miles upstream from the friend who was letting up camp on his lawn. I began to see the Tualatin are portentous, as possessed of the same ominous brooding as the Congo River in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

"Daddy," said Allie, "can I have another marshmallow?"

I gave her one.

"Daddy, is it evening time yet?"

"Yes."

We got back in the boat.

OUR EXPEDITION WAS BORN, I GUESS, when Allie yanked out her tooth and then greeted me, one day when I picked her up at school, with a proud, gappy smile.

"They’re gonna fall out one by one," she announced gleefully, tracing a facile loop inside her mouth, "and then all my baby teeth will be gone!"

She handed me the tooth and I looked at it in my palm. It was so small, and so bloody and sharp. I was holding, it seemed, a little relic of her kid-animal self, a piece of a child who had so far experienced the world not intellectually, and not through the filter of pop culture, but viscerally, as a cold ache in her mouth or a hot sun on her back. I was aware, suddenly and painfully, that that child would fade from me. It was already starting, in fact. When Allie came to my house now, she didn’t want to read story books. Rather, she craved to run down the block and play "doorbell ditch" with her friends.

I wanted one last, lingering hit of her innocence, and it so happened that I had just bought an inflatable kayak. Indeed, I was giddy with the thing—delighted at how much adventure that flimsy piece of plastic could give me. There was no need for $1400 boat, no need for a sports utility vehicle. On my days off, I just took the bus out to the farthest reaches of my watery city and kayaked toward home. In the evenings, I patched the punctures on the floor of the kitchen. Allie climbed into the deflated boat and pretend-paddled. Eventually, the idea of a major expedition took form.

"Daddy, let’s go to China!"

"Well...."

"What about that river that goes past Aunt Jane’s house?"

"The Hudson?"

We settled on the Tualatin—which begins in the Oregon Coast Range, travels east through orchards and berry farms, and then flushes into the much broader Willamette River—because it is safe and calm (the word Tualatin means "slow and lazy" in the language of the indigenous Kalapaya) and because, frankly, I wanted an unspectacular river. What I wanted to cling to most was Allie’s kid-wonder over everyday things—her thrill for making bouquets out of weeds on our walks home from school, say. She could still love the Tualatin; she was, blessedly, still too young to realize her dad is a cheapskate.

WHEN WE PUSHED AWAY FROM THE BANK, the green water was glassy and we moved without speaking, Allie lounging against the backpack, resting her hands on her neck, and I crouched in the stern, working the paddle. We saw a great blue heron. We passed a rope swing and a discarded tire, and then we came upon an old man in a small wooden fishing boat, white with green trim.

Allie, for some reason, felt compelled to smother this fellow in candor. "Rock Creek was really crazy," she said, "and my dad got all the stuff wet and now I’m getting sort of hungry because it’s almost my bed time and we haven’t eaten dinner yet."

From beneath his green and yellow John Deere cap, clenching a cigarette in his teeth, the man looked at me, skeptically. "Well, why we don’t give her a Pepsi?" he said. He pulled one from out of a cooler and then, encouraged by this generous act, I asked if he might, um, have any matches to spare.

He handed me two cardboard matches along with a crinkled, fish-smeared matchbook jacket and, very carefully, I deposited the entire gift into a plastic film canister. Then we paddled away, resolved to camp at the next decent spot, even if it was private property, and to cup our hands over the flame and hope. We found a flat spot in the high grass and got out, whereupon we noticed that the tent was, well, somewhere back on Rock Creek and that the sleeping bags were in fact drenched, and cold.

Panic surged through me. We would die of hypothermia—I was certain of it. I was a reckless parent, an idiot. I stared in disgust at the water; I imagined that already Allie was shivering, that her slender lips were losing their color. And then something emerged on the water, gliding and dreamlike: the old man, the tip of his cigarette glowing orange in the dusk.

I rushed Allie into the kayak, began paddling toward him.

"Where are we going, Daddy?"

"I don’t know. Stop wiggling. Maybe a motel."

"With a swimming pool?"

He gave us a ride in his pickup the nearest town, Hillsboro, and Allie, squeezed in the middle in the truck’s cab, talked the whole way. "We saw a duck and seven little ducklings," she said, "and one time when the camping stove fell into Rock Creek my dad got kind of a little bit mad and..."

The old man dropped us off at the Travelodge. Then we got a room and I tucked Allie (along with Bunny) into the king-sized bed and watched her drift off to sleep. By the time she was gently snoring, I was thinking of a story by Tobias Wolff, "Fresh Tracks in the Snow," in which the young narrator’s erratic, seldom present father takes him skiing—and then flaunts the highway patrol by driving, swooping and swerving, on a mountain road thick with fresh-fallen snow. There is an edge of terror to the piece, but that only enhances the brightness, the sense that, this time at least, the boy and his dad are alive together. Wolff concludes, "If you’ve never driven fresh powder, you’ve never driven."

Allie and I now knew what he meant. We too had pried life open a bit; we too had returned from the wilderness with a new electricity crackling between us, with a story we could tell one another.

I daubed the Travelodge skin lotion onto the stinging cuts on my shins and then I climbed into the bed beside Allie and slept.

TIME PASSED. Allie’s goldfish, Rainbow, died in the bowl at her mother’s house and Allie took the orange corpse outside and placed it into the stream there, in the dubious hope that it could float east toward the Tualatin. Allie turned six. Someone gave her a heart-shaped purse, replete with a hair brush and a small heart-shaped mirror, for her birthday. The river taunted us. We had yet to complete our circuit through the metropolis; we had not camped, as Allie was yearning to do. Eventually, on a scorching morning in June, we went back, this time skipping Rock Creek and sailing directly from the last bus stop to the river in style, in a taxi cab.

We didn’t make the designated camp site this time either, but the calamity was a little less keening. We camped, actually—in a filbert orchard beside a small hill where I hoped the orchardist wouldn’t find us.

"I’ll put my life jacket right outside the tent," Allie said after we brushed our teeth, "so they’ll see there’s a kid here and they’ll be nice."

"Okay."

"Daddy, are there any police boats on this river?"

"No."

"Daddy, can you turn the flashlight on so I can look in that mirror at my hair again?"

I did. Her hair looked fine—exquisite for a girl who had been swashbuckling around in a river all day. But in the morning, as we ate our oatmeal, Allie was gazing into that mud-spattered mirror again and combing her pigtails with her red brush. She was focused on this and not into talking, even though it seemed to me like a time for reminiscing, for summing things up. A mile downstream, we were going to call it quits many, many miles short of our goal; we would deflate our boat and take a cab to the closest bus stop.

"Allie," I said, "what would you say were your three favorite things about the Tualatin River?"

"Oh, I don’t know," she said, prattling in disinterest, "the cartoons at the motel, that beaver we saw, and the marshmallows."

I washed the dishes eventually, and loaded all the stuff back into the boat. Then we began paddling toward the bridge. Slowly, because in the early morning stillness the river was beautiful. Fog rose from the water and redwing blackbirds darted in the cottonwoods on the shoreline. But perched high on top of my backpack, Allie saw none of this, for now she was looking solely into the mirror, combing her hair, teasing it, braiding it—preening just like a grownup.

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