The first thing you notice is color. Shades of blue water, the current stirring green plants below, rushing into shadows along the banks, gray for a moment, emerging into the light as blue once more. Then you touch it, that blue water. If you’re there on a cold winter day it’s warm, on a hot summer day, it’s cold. How does that happen?

That’s what a constant 72 degrees all year feels like and it feels like that because it comes from deep in the rocks below. Aquifer water. You settle into your seat and slide away from shore. And now you’re floating on it. Paddling or just relaxing and letting the current do the work.

Already, two of your senses have been in a dialogue with the Ichetucknee River. But the river isn’t done with you. You’ll talk with your companions, maybe laugh some. Then those tree limbs bending over the water, the sky playing hide and seek behind the leaves, they will, sooner or later slow you down to the river’s speed. And you’ll get quiet. And then the floodplain forest steps up to the podium.

Sound travels differently over the water and that’s noticeable when you hear a bird, a woodpecker, a warbler, deep inside the tree line. They sound big and their call takes time to fade.

Decaying vegetation, flowering plants, the water now drying on your skin all offer up their scent. And wherever you had been in your head moments before, those thoughts, distractions, cares just dissolved in that blue water. And you begin to look around. Really look.

What else will you see?

Start up close. That little winged thing flirting with the tip of your kayak paddle, resting on it as you pause between strokes? It’s a damselfly. Maybe a smoky rubyspot, hanging on for dear life not just to you but to its very existence, finding, for now at least, species security in this sheltered river space. You smile and it takes off, upward, your gaze follows and you see another, bigger one. Dragonfly, perhaps a prince baskettail with a few similar ones nearby doing not-so-random zigs and zags as they feed on things invisible to you.

The water dripping off your paddle and down your arm reminds you that it’s cold but you’ve looked up and the sky has your attention now. The swallowtail kites take over, three of them showing off moves they might have learned from dragonflies while they, too, feed on airborne insects and taunt you with flashes of black and white feathers as they hover over the river channel then dip a wing and glide out of sight over the treetops.

You laugh some more, splash some more, paddle some more but you’re looking around now. You look down, look deep through the reflections on the surface, through the turbulence. American eelgrass and foxtail rooted to the silver sand on the river bottom wave in the current, wave up to you. You wave back.

You thought you were here to cool off, to be outside, to say you’d been to this storied waterway. Now you’re interacting with it.

It gets quiet again as you and your crowd float on, then someone in a boat ahead shouts and points to a spot on the river close by. Alligator? Possible. Cottonmouth or Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake swimming from shore to shore? Possible. But it’s that thing you’d all hoped to see, that very thing that’s returning here in ever greater numbers each year that decided to make an appearance among you. You were already glad you came to this river today, had already decided you’d return before the manatee glided silently by inches beneath you, a beamy gray silhouette you compare to a kayak’s length, knowing now what a nine foot aquatic mammal looks like up close. While the others shout you hear yourself simply exhale an audible “oh.” And the damp hair on your forearms attempts to stand on end.

Still savoring that encounter, as you round another bend you see wet, shining chestnut-colored fur as it flashes along the shoreline among floating vegetation. One of your companions guesses otter, another beaver. You wait for it to reappear but that riverine resident has moved on. In this spot either guess could be the correct one.

A few whistling bird calls echoing in the forest and the croak of a startled limpkin are the soundtrack for your next discovery which comes only moments after that flash of chestnut fur, moments that felt like minutes in the best sort of way. It’s the way of the river to reshape time, it’s how it works and it’s working on you. And then your eyes connect again with movement below the surface, not plants this time but a fish looking like it transcended time and arrived here straight from the Mesozoic. Its ancient, bold lines are stirring in a primal way. It’s your turn to point into the water and shout. “Gar!” Smaller fish hover below it like a fan club while a Suwannee bass follows its own agenda and heads back upstream against the current.

And then you do the math. Adding up the many plants and animals that have already called for your attention, like turtles on logs, you suddenly notice all the other ones you took for granted. They were background. And there must be hundreds. That’s when you remember the sign you passed a few minutes earlier in the small, fenced off watery nook called Coffee Spring along the bank. Something about the Ichetucknee siltsnail. Only occurs right here in a space not much bigger than a two-car garage.

Days later it will all still be vivid. Siltsnails. Manatees. Damselflies and otters. Submerged plants that wave from the depths of colorful water. And the interaction you had with a river that, remarkably, seems to speak your language.