August 15, 1845, Friday.

'Here, Jim! Mother sent these sandwiches.' Hannibal thrust a parcel into his friend's hands and grabbed him in a bear hug. 'Stay away from river pirates and write me here. They'll send it up to Erie.' Jim promised that he would.

'Have you got everythin'?' asked Cherry. Jim nodded, holding up the bundle of his worldly goods, containing two clean shirts, his new coat, his fiddle, and his mother's Bible, wrapped up in his father's old matchcoat. Cherry's flute he had around his neck, as well as the cord to a pouch inside his shirt. That leather pouch contained his money: forty-two dollars he'd saved over a lifetime of music-making, plus fifty dollars given him the night before by John Dougherty, who wished him a safe journey and made him promise to stay in touch with his Brookville family.

'Don't kiss too many Pittsburgh girls,' cautioned Dan Craig, 'or Cherry will be jealous.' He grinned when Cherry poked him in the ribs.

'Come on if you're comin'!' called Don Custer from the other end of the raft. 'I want to get to Pittsburgh afore Thanksgivin'.' Jim gave them all a last embrace, and hurried aboard the timber raft.

As the raft moved into the current and away from Brookville, Jim looked back, waving, long after his friends had become small dots on the horizon. It wasn't until he lost sight of the town around the bend in the creek that he dropped his arm. Then he settled down on the planks that, like him, were headed to the Allegheny, and down that mighty river to the forks of the Ohio.

Like the trees he was floating on, Jim had come of age in Brookville.

Like the boards that made up the raft, he was destined to become something different in Pittsburgh.

Dmitri Gheorgheni