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.