Itinerant on the Water

I never thought about kayaking as something that I wanted to do. The opportunity presented itself, though, and I took it. Why not? It was vacation, the boats were there, so indeed, why not?

A bit downstream from where I put in, a dock, fallen into disuse and disrepair, stands in the water. No longer is there a boat moored there; no children leap into the water; no sign of human passing is there except the dock itself. But it is weathered, the dock. The wood is grey and porous. Several of the boards near the end have fallen away completely. And after her relentless habit, nature has worn away at it until is has come to look as if it truly belongs -- not like a mark of man's intrusion, but rather like a unique formation of logs, only vaguely reminiscent of some visitor long since forgotten.

There is something indescribable about the calm of drifting noiselessly through a shallow river.The water is so clear, the river bottom leaps up as though truly near enough to touch. You can see the nodding, swaying fronds of grey-green, schools of minnows darting to and fro, the occasional silvery flick of a bluegill's tail as it pops to the surface to snatch a skating bug. Lilypads roll on the surface of the water. Each moves, tethered to its own stem, but the collective motion is like scales of a fish: each indiscernable from the others. Water lilies dot the surface of this aquatic garden, each in different degrees of bloom. I am afraid to breathe -- afraid to disturb the scene around me, yet each breath draws me further in -- blurs the boundaries between me and the native life. They all know I am here, but they seem unperterbed. It is as if they know the grand truth surrounding and consuming us all: I will glide over the water, and it will part before me. I will perhaps disturb a plant or an animal with my passing, but it will be just that: a passing. My presence here is, in the grand scheme of things, irrelevant. I will pass through, and nature will, in her gentle and irrepressible fashion, erase all evidence. She will consume all traces of my passing, making it all her own again. My mark in this place is transient at best, but the mark of this place on my soul is indelible.