We were walking home west along the River Trail in North Little Rock after Lucinda Williams closed out the Arkansas Folklife Festival a couple of weeks ago. As we picked our way through the thinning crowd, I glanced down at the Arkansas River, dappled with moonlight and streaked with color reflected from the lights along the bridges and the skyline on the opposite shore, and thought about how we live in such a pretty place.

This is something that sometimes gets lost in the sensible day-to-day routines of our lives. The rocky bluffs become backdrops, the river an inconvenient border funneling traffic to too few bridges. Familiarity has a way of editing beauty out of the frame. There is no view so spectacular that we cannot grow used to it, no joy that cannot be domesticated.

We live near the river, close enough to know the rhythm of its traffic and the grinding of the trains into the yard in Baring Cross. We see the travelers and the shirtless stunned wanderers, the professorial little man who drags a string of plastic bottles tied to a stick behind him. We see the flash of bright-jerseyed bicyclists, the dog walkers and the couples holding hands. Most days, before we end our morning walk, Rikki will pull me toward the River Trail and we'll look across the water to the dome of the state Capitol peeking over the treeline. We watch the tugs and barges, kayakers and bass boats, and the occasional piece of delta-bound debris. Sometimes there are pelicans, egrets, herons, and beavers.

I think about the power of the river, how I probably wouldn't make it to the other side if I tried to swim it.

On July 4, Arkansas Game and Fish officers pulled a body from that river.

A few days earlier, more than three dozen agencies had been searching another stretch of the river near Dardanelle........

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