Floating---
I remember Mom taking us on a float trip down the Musselshell River. We caught a ride to a point several miles upstream from our farm and threw in our innertubes and floated down the river to our place. We had to stand up and carry our tubes through several locations where the irrigation demands had diminished the water flow to a trickle. When we were little we called these the "rapids" but I realize now they were nothing like the rapids that serious river rafting/canoe enthusiasts would encounter. There were also a few spots where "fences" had been stretched across the river (I think we called them a water gap) to prevent the cattle and horses from leaving the pasture via the water route. Our tubes did not even closely resemble the ones pictured here either. Ours were discarded tire innertubes with multiple patches, but they got us from point A to point B with a lot of fun in between! Oh, and we did not have life vests either. I thought that was what the innertube was for!
It looks like the ice is still moving off the river in this picture. This picture might have been taken not too far from our favorite swimming spot.
Swimming---
We had a fun swimming hole on the bend of the river just below the barn and corrals. In the summer we fished and swam there and in the winter we skated there. The river bank on the barn side of the river was quite high, maybe 10 feet higher than the water level. The other side of the river had a gradual shallow bank with willows growing along it. I still love thinking about the sweet smell of the willows along the ditch banks and the river banks. That is where we hung out in the shallow water before we actually learned how to swim. I would compare it to the shallow wading pool at a public pool...only better! We enjoyed sinking our feet deep into the black river mud and covering our bodies with the mud and then diving in to wash off the stinking mud. At one point the boys built a diving board on the high bank that we used for a while until it became too rickety to use and was finally washed away by a flood. We also had a spot that we threw water on and slid on like otters. It made a great mudslide. We wore out more than one swimming suit sliding on that mud. Just off to the right of the diving board was an old truck that somehow found its final resting place at the bottom of the river. When I was very young I couldn't even reach the truck unless I dove down to touch it, which I didn't like to do, but as I got older I could stand on it on my tiptoes and keep my head above water.
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