Rivers smell right. Slightly fishy, mud dense with minerals. This weekend, the Meramec State Park superintendent told me, the river ran a little high and looked murkier than usual. I had only seen it a few times, twice last summer as we entered via the Huzzah, and once more when my friends and I visited Route 66 State Park. It looked great to me. Smelled right, too.

This is a gem of a park, and I needed more than two days to capture it — a week, maybe, with morning hikes, cool afternoons inside Fisher Cave, night time s’mores at a campfire’s edge . . . and somewhere in there a float trip, because the water carries you and the people act friendly and I have nothing to lose except time.