The Good Dog Park path runs along the Deschutes, and by the time we reach the wide stretch where the bank drops gently into the water, I have already done the math.

Dad’s pace has been steady — long strides, the leash with a little give in it, the junipers and ponderosas giving way to cottonwoods as the river comes into view. The air holds at 19°C in the shade and something warmer in the open. My ears have been warm for a while. My paws have done their work on the trail. There is dust on my legs up to the white of my boots.

The river is moving. Not urgently, but with conviction. It is the color of sky and stone together, and where the sun hits it directly the surface becomes briefly impossible to look at.

I go in.

Not dramatically. There is no run, no leap. I walk to the edge where the water is still and shallow and step forward until the cold comes up around my legs, then my chest, then the heavy curtains of my ears lift slightly from the surface tension and the whole thing — the walk, the dust, the warm ears, the morning, Tuesday — steps out of me and into the current.

For a moment I am just standing in a river. The water moves past. I do not move with it.

The cold is particular. Not uncomfortable. Not something to be managed. It is simply accurate — the exact right temperature for what the morning asked of me, delivered without ceremony.

Gus is nearby. He has waded in to his ankles and stopped there, which is his position on most things. He looks at the middle of the river with the expression of someone who has been offered a second opinion and is not sure he needed the first.

I stay in a little longer.

Dad is on the bank. I can hear him. The leash has gone slack on the ground. There is nothing required of me at this moment except to be cold and still and correct, which I am.

When I come out, the water runs off my chest and legs and the air hits the wet fur and the temperature drops another degree around me. I shake once. The world reassembles itself — the path, the cottonwoods, the sound of the river continuing without me.

We turn back toward the car.

The walk home is quieter than the walk out, which is how it should be. My ears are cool now. My paws are clean. The dust is somewhere behind us in the river, on its way to wherever rivers take such things.

Summer asks very little, and gives back considerably more than it is owed.

~P.W.