water

i read about the little lake in one of those guidebooks. i look for an easy trip because the sweetie is willing to kayak class 5 rapids (class 6 rapids offer a constant threat of death and extreme danger) and i want to avoid this while offering him something fancy enough to be worth the bother. the book promises a little lake and a river flowing into it and then out of it down a mile and a half to a waterfall (class 5 rapids are full of waterfalls!). it promises an easy time with something to look at. so we put the kayaks on the car and squeeze ourselves into our fake-seal pants and we go.

we walk the kayaks down to the dock, which is a floating platform alongside a three foot wide channel in the weeds and muck. the water is too low for the dock to be useful, but the way it leans suggests maybe we wouldn't want to use it even in higher water. we put the kayaks at the edge of the water and move, one after the other, down the narrow channel with the funhouse dock looming over us.

it is a small lake, more pond, really, but if you want to know the truth it's just an open space in the wetlands. because that's what it is all around us. swamp. marsh. pine barrens without the pines. tall, stick-straight trunks of trees stretch upward with not a leaf or branch to them. desert. waste land. we paddle left toward the river outlet and pass an old camp's dock. it is bedraggled, with unrecognizable watercraft tied to it. pogo sticks on floats. there are broken shacks up the land a bit, then the camp itself, low and ugly and empty. ghost town. abandoned summer camp. yes. of course. i look across the lake the other way. to the razor wire. to a tall building that looks like something from an old strip mining venture in my own hometown. a concrete rectangle reaching up several stories past the other buildings, with two or three windows to break the flat surface. the blades of the wire glitter out there in the sun like sparkles on the water. it is a saturday around noon and nobody is outside.

so this is where things stand. we are floating on the surface of a small lake/large pond/space between cattails. to the one side is an abandoned summer camp, complete with broken down docks. to the other is an equally abandoned, though likely very full, prison for children ages 12 to 18. babies taken away from their own families with the idea that raising them here, all together, might work better than what is happening at home. i am waiting for the monster that most certainly lives in the bottom of this murky lake to leap up and swallow me, kayak and all. there has to be one, right? water so cloudy you can't see a bright yellow paddle once you dip it under the surface.

i want to be clear of the buildings on either side of us. the camp. the other camp. we paddle toward the river and a great blue heron flaps big, slow wings up and lifts itself out of the marshgrass where the book said there is a rookery. it flies down the river, away from the buildings, flap. flap. too slow to stay up in the air, if you ask me. it goes low along the water at first, then rises up over the spindle trees and cattails and beaver dams. it flies a long time with sticklegs hanging down below it and i watch until i can't see it.

there are beaver dams everywhere. tall mounds of sticks, five, six feet up and big enough around to let a substantial group of friends sit down to dinner inside. the sweetie rows over to one and sniffs. he has read somewhere that there is an oil the animals leave all around their homes to let others know who lives where. he says it is supposed to smell wonderful, that it is used as a flavoring in foods. i doubt this and say as much. i know that all mammals using scent glands keep those glands tucked neatly up as near as possible to where the tail lives. that is not a good place.  i paddle on by him.

we thread our way around sunken logs and shallows and the terrifying withered roots of dead water lilies, floating like mummies here and there. there are more broken down docks along the way, some nearly indistinguishable from the cattails and quiet tree stalks around them. they jut out into the water from nowhere, from more water. but i have spent enough time with a man who wears a gila monster on his arm to know the desert isn't as ugly as it looks first glance. i look up quick enough to see another of those herons floating overhead and figure maybe that's a start.

the water doesn't seem to be moving the way a river would. the wind pushes us upstream fast enough we have to put some effort into our paddling to get downstream. but we do. and pretty soon there are little jewels everywhere. we round a curve in the water and there are trees shaped like trees now, rather than sticks. the land grows a little more solid and rises up out of the water a little more real than it had in all that murk.

we don't talk much. there's not much to say and the wind grabs every word and strangles it anyway. we paddle on into the very real world. the sweetie finds the waterfall first. we are upstream of it and i have imagined more than once this trip that we will roll over it without warning and will plunge to our untimely deaths.   turns out it's not that sort of waterfall at all. it is a series of short, wide drops that finally let that lazy marshwater go wild. there are remnants of stone walls all along the falls and there's a big, flat rock ledge where we pull the kayaks up and step out.

 we walk carefully over the mossy rocks on downstream a bit. we stand a while and watch the water tear over the rocks with a small, quiet frog who does not seem entirely committed to his color choice. spring is confusingly early this year and he is not quite sure what to do with so much early april at his disposal. we walk on past and he keeps his eyes on the water. when we head back to the kayaks i keep my eyes on the shifting rocks under my feet. this turns out to be a very good idea because there are trilliums stretching themselves out from the rock crevices and into that same sun the frog has been using.

we paddle back upstream, away from the waterfall and the living trees and the high banks. we make our way back through the cattails and beaver dams and the great blue heron rookery. the sweetie startles a beaver surfacing near the shore and the animal warns his kin with a sharp slap of the tail that sends water spraying high into the air and sounds like lightning striking a tree. the sweetie, undeterred by the lack of desire animals in nature have to spend time with him, paddles over to get a closer look.

the bedraggled docks slide into view and then the low, ugly buildings. the cement tower. the glittering razor wire. there are more boats on the lake now, fishermen mostly sitting still near the shore, but also a group of five or six folks kayaking together, heading out to where we have already been. they cut across the middle of the lake like a flock of geese. we wish them a good trip. beautiful day, says one of them as their boats pass ours. we nod, both of us, back at him. it is a beautiful day. all of it.