Rivers soak into your bones.

I was 12 when my father and I received an invitation from a group of his friends to raft the remote Selway River in Idaho. A city kid from the Northeast, I was unaccustomed to the loamy smells of the Western wilderness and astonished by these roughshod river rats who spent their days joyously chasing water. One of their raft trailers featured a hand-painted sign that read, “No matter where you at, there you are.”

My father and I would later accompany this crew on some of the West’s great rivers — the Snake, the Clearwater, the Salmon, the San Juan. We rafted Desolation Canyon in Utah and Colorado’s Gates of Lodore, a red rock chasm that seems to defy gravity above the jewel-like Green River.

A river seduces you from the very first moment you push off from shore, when you sense that first insistent pull of current, the frenetic churn of white water giving way to the hypnotic stillness of an eddy. Each night at camp, after a day of chasing water, after the best meal of your life, you drift into a dreamless sleep against the gentle hush of the river on its way to whatever tomorrow will bring.

This past summer, our family was invited to a wedding in Bozeman, Mont. I now had two boys of my own, Holt, 10, and Max, 7, and wanted them to feel the current’s steady tug, to taste that first jet of white water as it leaped from the river and smacked you in the face. So I looked into the possibility of a river float in Montana.

I found a three-day, two-night trip run by Glacier Raft Co. down the Middle Fork of the Flathead, named for the Salish (Flathead) people who lived in the watershed alongside the Kootenai and Kalispel. The Middle Fork hugs the southern border of Glacier National Park just beneath the Continental Divide, weaving through alpine forests of lodgepole pine, western larch and black cottonwood.

We flew into Glacier Park International Airport in early July, with Montana as busy as I’d ever seen it. In Glacier National Park, reservations are now required to drive up the popular Going to the Sun Road. Everyone seemed grateful that the forest fire smoke hadn’t quite arrived yet, though everyone knew it was coming. It comes every year now.

From the town of West Glacier, we drove 40 minutes down rural Highway 2 to the put-in, where we met our guides, plopped boats in the water, lashed down gear and pushed off.

Our river party was composed of three families, including five adults and five kids. A trio of rafts was helmed by our guides, Aubrey, Margot and Josh. They had grown up scattered across the United States, but had all experienced a strong magnetism toward the Flathead. In his free time between guided trips, Josh told me, he would head back to the river and play in the rapids with a small, inflatable kayak designed for children. He didn’t want to be anywhere else.

I worried slightly whether a commercial river trip like this would feel as authentic as those improvised forays of my youth, but commercial trips are a dream. You do not need to show up with a trailer full of gear. Our guides did much of the hard work — cooking, navigating and dealing with the famous toilet-in-a-box (aka “the groover”). They told tall tales, listened to us ramble and left just enough chores for us to feel useful.

That first day on the river, our party began to relax. The adults’ shoulders unfurled, their arms grew long. A few of the kids were still shifty with city energy. What was there to do but stare at the water and the scenery? This is boring. But after a while, even the kids started to notice the details: the rainbow swatch of purple, green and umber river stones flying beneath our boats; an osprey watching us from his perch on a juniper tree; a cutthroat trout slicing through the water’s surface; the river descending to the sea like a long staircase. Over there! That boulder looks like a man sitting on a groover.

This was river time. River time is the opposite of the Instagram scroll, where life is a series of meaningless trinkets designed to capture your attention for barely a second or two.

Indeed, one of the best parts of the trip was that none of our phones worked. At camp each night, our kids would spend hours throwing rocks into the water. Holt and I balanced stones in elaborate formations, building great cities of the imagination. Each morning, we destroyed our work, leaving the beach a blank canvas again.

The week we were there, the entire West was suffering through a heat wave. During the day it was well above 90 degrees, but if you ever felt too cooked, you could just slide overboard into the brisk, 55-degree water. Snow melt is a slap on the back saying, “Wake up! Here you are.”

The heat wave and distant wildfire smoke, which moved in during the second day, nudged our conversations to whether river trips would still be around in 20 years. The Kootenai called the area around Glacier National Park Ya-qawiswitxuki — “the place where there is a lot of ice.” In 1850, there were 80 glaciers in the park. Today, fewer than 26 remain, and in recent years, climate change has accelerated the speed of the glaciers’ retreat. It’s unclear when exactly the glaciers will disappear entirely (some scientists have guessed 2030), but when they do, our guide Margot wasn’t sure how runnable the Middle Fork would be.

“I appreciate every time I get to do this,” she said.

At camp on our second and final night, as the Flathead braided its way through the wide-open Nyack flats with Loneman Peak towering above us, the adults stood knee-deep in the chilly river. We sipped adult drinks as our toes rubbed up against stones polished smooth and our guides, despite being busy preparing a pasta dinner, had generously allowed our kids into their kitchen and given them fake mustaches, new identities.

Max, sporting a handlebar and straw hat, had now become Steve, a Kentucky miner. He came down to the beach and yelled, “Supper’s on, people!”

Where were we? Montana? Appalachia? One of the rivers of my childhood? Were all rivers the same river? No, even the Flathead was never the same river twice.

Maybe this is what is meant by the words on our friend’s trailer: “No matter where you at, there you are.” On a river, time is movement. You are everywhere and nowhere at once. Surrounded by billion-year-old geology, you are deeply present, attending to the contours of this moment, and then you are downstream.

The adults clinked cans one more time, rose from the glacial-fed waters, and followed Steve the miner up to our last supper on the river.

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