They say lift your eyes to the heavens, and of course that is fine advice. But mine would be to go dip a paddle where the heavens have congealed, forming a river, lake, or stream. You can see in that waterway all the shapes and hues that used to be cloud mist, now fused, quivering with magic. Here is luminosity that can suspend you on its skin amid a reflection or take you in its grip and hurtle you seaward through the contours of a continent.

We talk about the trips we make on rivers, but they are not really ours. They are forever the rivers' own journeys. They are the downstream migrations of melted ice crystals, columns of rain, silt swirls, sands, and chattering cobbles; the transport of mountainsides to ocean shelves over geologic epochs; the eternal etching and renovation of Earth's mobile crust. A river is a process. Even if we paddle from source to delta, we only connect for a while. The important thing is to at least truly connect.

I've ridden some fair lengths of water over the years, including many a crooked, white stretch. Shooting through haystacks and holes, you determine the boundary between what's fun and what's scary and in doing so can discover a good deal about yourself. The higher the class of rapids, the faster they sort out an individual's need for stimulation, challenge, and accomplishment.

Yet while I enjoy an adrenaline surge as well as the next person, I get confused by too much talk about battling torrents and conquering rivers, wondering if I might have stumbled into a convention of dam engineers. You know most tales that turn things like boulders into opponents are going to end up being mainly about the dear, old, human ego again, often swaddled in techno-gear and the latest ultra-outdoor fashions. What I like better is the potential of water journeys to carry the traveler clean beyond the self.

As with hiking, the rhythms of paddling build through the days of an outing until they seem inbred. Float long enough, and your awareness begins to float as well. Focusing less and less on the usual internal dialogue of me/my/mine, the mind searches out patterns in the shimmer of an eddy or the murmured conversations between currents and stones, the scent of new weather, a passage of birds overhead. You find that there are an astonishing number of ways  many as old as our kind  to read the environment and draw forth information about its workings, whose embrace sustains every living thing. It no longer matters as much exactly who you are or what others think you are or what society wishes you were better programmed to do. This is between a more essential you and a more essential world.

Rivers put your finger right on the pulse of creation. During my longest trips, I felt as close as I probably ever will to a state of grace. But before I turn all writerly and start to rhapsodize about paddling as a form of prayer, I'll get on to the other way I know to connect with the flow of water. Which is simply to spend a lot of time by it, fishing, critter-watching, or maybe just skipping stones and hanging out.

At the end of one Montana river run with my buddy Brien, I met a woman named Karen. She and I dated. We lived together. Months later, I traveled with Brien down a different Montana river, one whose course defines a border of Glacier National Park. It was a December day with bare cottonwood branches splayed like cracks against an icy sky. From time to time, light snow sifted past our bow and into the dark purl of wavelets. My hands, gripped to the paddle, went numb. Karen was coming to pick us up. I commented to Brien that, if she somehow thought to bring a hot toddy, I was going to ask her to marry me. She arrived with a thermos of the stuff. Brien told her what I had said.

Karen and I were married the following June  in a canoe a few miles upstream. We built a cabin along a channel of that river, where it loops past beaver lodges and 400-year-old spruce, and reared two children there. Moose, elk, and deer produced new generations beside us. Their hoofprints mingled with the tracks of wolves and cougars, while grizzly bears cratered the gravel bars digging for starchy roots and stripped the berries from hawthorne bushes along incoming streams. We could skate the river's braids for miles following the slide marks of otters when winter conditions were right. Come summer, I would put on a diving mask and drift along to look at big trout hanging in the current until my head ached from the cold.

You won't happen upon many places in the lower 48 states with stronger, more animated wildlife communities. And I know you won't find water any more lovely or clear. On the other hand, these resources lie within a nation with a lot of reckless habits left over from its frontier days  a nation now harboring the world's third-largest population and vastly confused about how to exist on its portion of the globe. I don't claim to have the answers. All I know is that it seems to be the condition of our times that you have to fight like hell to ever hold on to the good things that untamed landscapes offer so freely.

Karen and I found ourselves contending with coal mining proposals, oil and gas exploration, sedimentation from logging roads and the subsidized overcutting of timber on national forest lands, unregulated real estate subdivision, and attempts to push a paved highway up the river valley to Canada, which would have spurred the whole pace of development in general. We continue to battle such threats today. Thomas Jefferson warned that"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." It is also, in the modern era, the price of life and the pursuit of happiness in a natural setting. It is certainly the price of wild rivers.

Yet the waters still flow bright past our cabin. Animal neighbors linked to the rich floodplain are still around; in some ways more than ever. The cougars have been flourishing. The wolves, which emigrated naturally from Canada during the late 1970's, continue to expand their range and ecological role. As an apparent result, some male grizzlies have begun to stay out all winter scavenging carcasses left by these competitors. One griz recently dug a black bear out of a den and ate it. The links keep multiplying around what amounts to a wild river in the greatest sense.

I owe so much to the waterways I have known, I'll stay connected to them no matter where I happen to actually be. I'll rise to praise them and always to defend them, and I'll rise with boundless gratitude to explore the next.

Douglas H. Chadwick is a wildlife biologist who studied mountain goats and grizzlies for seven years. Now he does less research and more writing. He has paddled from the Congo to the North Slope of Alaska. Chadwick writes primarily of conservation, wildlife, and how Nature works. He is a regular contributor to National Geographic.

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