I spent a good part of today in or on or near the lake where I am staying this week. Lake Elkhart. Wisconsin. Two hundred or so acres of water, an elongated amoeba shaped puddle. This morning, before seven, before boats with motors are officially allowed to go fast enough to produce a wake, the lake was silent and almost as still as glass. The sight and sound of it was all subtle, the real lake at work, water from shore to middle to shore responding to the absence of wind, the pure blue of the sky, the rising heat of the morning sun.
But then, around seven-thirty or eight, things changed. People arose, moved about, began to do what people do: work, play, make noise, leave their imprint on the earth. The little fish that had been languidly nibbling at the bases of weeds along the edge of the lake boiled up into schools of frenzied mini-sharks when half a dozen children began chucking muffin crumbs into the water. The quiet was pierced by, oh, you name it: motor boats, the scoop and chuck of oars, commands of Comin’ about! followed by CLUNK and immediately Ow – Daaaaad!
It was time to escape the noise. I borrowed a camp paddleboat, dutifully put on the very large life jacket handed to me by an impossibly tan life guard with an enormous pair of binoculars hanging from a strap around his neck, and I headed out with my book and my cell phone. My intention was to follow the shore of the lake all the way around, stop somewhere in the middle where it was quiet, and read. Camp is not quiet, and not really meant for readers, or probably writers either for that matter. Still, I really needed a quiet place. And the middle of the lake seemed like a good idea. Why I had the cell phone I don’t know, but there it was. And there I was.
It was really clear really early on that it is to paddle a paddleboat by yourself. You paddle along and if you aren’t fairly diligent about steering, you go in a nice little circle. And you try not to imagine that very tan and rather charming lifeguard laughing at you. Here’s how you steer — there’s a thing, a pointy thing that goes in the water, sort of like an oar married to a keel with a door handle welded to it that you direct to the right when you want to go left, and left when you want to go right. Uh huh. You try it.
After mastering the steering, at last going intentionally in a single forward direction, it became abundantly clear that I would have to paddle fairly seriously to go at a reasonable pace. Like a spinning class on the lake. Boat aerobics. I was sweating in my boat, dripping under the damn life jacket, a hunk of foam incased in vinyl. So, off it came, and off we went, me and my little paddle boat, churning away, hugging the shore, looking for a nice little inlet where we could park, anchor, whatever it is you do with a boat. I was just getting into the rhythm of it — spin pedal spin pedal steer left, spin pedal spin pedal steer right — and going forward really nicely, right toward a very quiet spot by some very green trees, when all of a sudden out of nowhere a giant speedboat the size of the Queen Mary flew by, towing a giant inflated banana loaded with six shrieking kids. The boat and the banana carved a trough into the lake, spewing off a wake, six times higher than me and my little boat. And that wake was headed right toward me and my trusty boat.
Damn: spinpedalspinpedal steerleft spinpedalspinpedal steerright. I tried to point the bow into the wake, vaguely remembering a scene where the captain of the Titanic or maybe it’s George Clooney in The Perfect Storm, they point their ships into the swell of the waves. Even as I was coming about into the wake, it occured to me that emulating the advice of ship captains who die at sea is not a wise move. But there we were, me and my boat, dipping and bobbing up and down on the surface of the lake like some psychotic broncho boat. I held on to my life preserver, held onto my cell phone, held onto my book, and thought a lot of morbid thoughts. She drowned trying to find a quiet place to read. She drowned trying to save her cell phone. Oh, no. She drowned diving over the edge of her paddleboat in sheer embarrassment because the very tan lifeguard was now flying across the lake in the rescue boat, and then he was very carefully coming to a stop with no wake at all, and drifting in close to the little paddle boat, and asking very calmly, as if he were just stopping by to say hello: Everything all right?
There are times when you’re thirteen and a complete geek again, and this was one of them. I realized he had been watching me — that’s his job — through his super huge binoculars the whole time. I smiled. I super casually removed my death grip from the edge of the paddle boat. Oh yes, I’m fine, really, just reading. And I held up my book.
The very tan lifeguard just nodded, never said a word about my lifevest gripped in the other hand, the cellphone between my knees, and waved and slowly motored back to the dock. And that’s when I, as though I were the coolest middle-aged sunburnt woman in a paddleboat on the lake, picked up my cellphone and called the first thing I could think of: my voicemail. You have no new messages. I nodded, smiled, and chatted vigorously with my voicemail until the rescue boat was back at the dock and I could imagine the lifeguard turning around to check on me one last time with those enormously keen binoculars.
