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…