Kayaking With Ducks

I felt myself sinking again. So I bought a kayak.  I took it out on a weekday, up a highway, to a lake that just two months earlier had been frozen solid. It seemed too easy. The whole way there, I kept thinking something terrible was about to happen, that the orange tie-down holding the boat in place would unhook from the truck bed and send the driver behind me to a tragic death. Or that I’d get out on the water and somehow tip over and find myself trapped beneath the boat-turned-coffin. I was so used to disaster that its absence made me writhe.

The midges and mayflies on the water were no different. They buzzed about in fits just above the water’s surface, like airplanes shifting holding patterns at high speed. I wondered what told them to move first here, then there. Was it hunger or fear?

I looked up to see something much bigger flitting toward me: a bat in broad daylight, bumping wildly across the sky, its wings translucent against the sun. It pitched about, threw its weight first here, then there, as if it were trying to find an opening back into the night. Then it disappeared.

As the current carried me closer to the shore, I made out a log, barely protruding from the water, hosting a cluster of small turtles undisturbed. There were ducks and geese too, and one lone falcon that swooped down onto a branch, losing itself from my sight until it decided to take off again. 

So much life along the edges of the lake, here with no clock to count the minutes before I had to pick up a child from school, or the days before a deadline, or the weeks before a lease was up and I had to decide again where to stack my books or on which wall to hang a mirror.

I thought, Is anything real? The ducks seemed to know.