Eat breakfast on a lake

“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”- Henry David Thoreau

“Let’s grab a cup of coffee sometime soon,” I emailed.

“Sounds good,” Brooks emailed back. “It’s supposed to be a beautiful day on Wednesday – how about going out on Beaver Lake?"

I hesitated.

Should I tell him that the last time I got in a boat, I single handedly capsized it, with everyone aboard joining me in the water, people who—it appears—had no sense of humor, of adventure, of joie de vrie, people who worried about their hairdos and boating shoes? And who knew that you need to step into the middle of the boat? Is there a School for Common Sense that I somehow missed? Was I absent that day in school? Is that the day I had my wisdom teeth cut out and drank peanut butter milkshakes until I was foundered on Skippy forever?

“That’d be great!” I said, gamely. “I love boats!”

I should have known better than think I could fool a longtime sailing man like Brooks. He’s spent his life on boats, designing his first one when he was nine, building it when he was 11, launching it on his 12^th birthday.

I was wallpapering my room with Tiger Beat posters of Bobby Sherman, chasing Bryan Stephens, playing PeeWee football, wearing Peter Max hot pants, and selling and eating obscene numbers of Girl Scout cookies (Thin Mints rule!) when I was 12, not building a boat.

It was a beautiful, blue sky, cloudless, clear see forever kind of day. I met Brooks at Beaver Lake.

“Since we’ll be sitting at opposite ends of the boat,” he said when I arrived, “I brought breakfast in separate bags for us.”

I looked down. In two canvas bags were identical, beautiful little offerings: a tall, silver cylinder thermos of Counter Culture coffee, hot, black, strong, like I like it. With them were muffins, napkins, and a bottle of orange juice wrapped in a towel for each of us, like a prize. It was like going to camp and having Mama pack my favorites cookies in the pocket of one of her aprons.

I decided right then and there that I was going to eat breakfast in a boat on Beaver Lake every day for the rest of my life.

“Your boat is beautiful,” I said, looking down at a dark blue Adirondack Guideboat trimmed in cherry, with caned seats, long oars that crossed over each other when you pulled, one hand on top of the other, effortlessly, or so it would seem. I was Kate Hepburn in The African Queen if, in fact, she was packing a cell phone and a bottle of Brita-filtered tap water for the trip.

Brooks slid the boat into the water, and got in. Effortlessly. Like he had been doing it since he was – oh, say – nine years old.

I stood, paralyzed on the dock. I’d estimate the water was only a few feet deep there, so it wasn’t the fear of drowning that stopped me. It was the memory of that capsized boat; it was a lack of surety. “Where should I step?” I asked.

Brooks smiled and said something about the middle of the boat.

With that, I stepped in with my left foot, into the center, leaving my right foot on the pier for the moment, and holding onto whatever that thing is called that sticks up from the pier. Suddenly, the boat started moving out from the pier, taking my left leg with it while my right one stayed solidly on the pier, creating in mere seconds an increasingly dire situation in which I was soon to be: 1) split in half, 2) in the water, 3) in the water with Brooks, organic spelt muffins, orange juice and two thermoses of black coffee.

I pawed at the boat with my left leg, like a small impotent palsy, trying to get it to move back to the right toward the pier. Brooks subtly helped – and without laughing, for which I give him Big Credit.

It only lasted a few seconds, and then we were on our way. But, my lord, the boat was so deep into the water that I felt like we’d pitch over at any moment, or that the water would start streaming in over the sides like those endless pools you see at the homes of movie stars where the pool seems to go over the horizon into the ocean (since they’re inevitably living at Malibu). It is a boat meant for slicing through water, a low profile, deep deep into the lake.

So there I sat in my pullover shirt and pinchy approximation of boating clothing, not moving a muscle.

“If you want to try to row the thing,” Brooks had written before we went, “don’t wear a button down shirt. Wear a pullover one instead.”

I pondered the physics of that statement for quite a while, sitting in front of my computer screen. What on earth was the reason for that? I wondered. Is it possible that the glinting of sunlight on buttons might blind the beavers? Are there killer fish in Beaver Lake hell bent on enlarging their button collection? 
Finally the suspense was too much for me, and I emailed Brooks back to ask.

“The handle of the right oar catches in the front of men’s button shirts. For women it’s generally the left oar. You can wear a button shirt and row with long oars safely if you leave the shirt unbuttoned. Or you can row ok in a buttoned shirt with short oars but I don’t have any of those.”

There are so very many things I don’t know. 

As I pondered the Button Shirt Norm, I realized that there are so many rules I don’t understand, ones that I rant and rave against, not knowing that there is (sometimes) a logical explanation knowable only to someone who has lived in that particular world far longer than me.

This is not to excuse stupid rules, those made up to reinforce power trips and to assert dominance of minor functionaries, the Catch-22 rules that obfuscate the simplicity of life. But on a sunny lake in a beautiful boat low into the water, eschewing buttons with abandon made perfect sense.

As we swept into water, it occurred to me that any American literature major worth their salt is in love with Moby Dick, this one no exception to that rule. Herman Melville would have to love water to write such a tale, though all through the writing he was either digging in the basement or sitting in that small upstairs room at Arrowhead in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, looking at a hump of a mountain, Mount Greylock, that inspired the whale.

He did love water: “Take almost any path you please,” he wrote in Moby-Dick in 1851, “and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries–stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded forever.”

There are different forms to meditation, I realized that morning on the lake. Some involve whale-shaped mountains, some involve journeys to high altitudes, some entail absolute silence or require renunciation, and at least one of them involves long oars, black coffee, and buttonless shirts.

I’m a redhead. Well, a former redhead, now white-headed, but with the skin of a redhead still, complete with memories of long-sleeved white shirts on the beach and zinc oxide under a plastic triangle that hung, impotently, from my significant cat-eyed glasses as a child. Pretty picture, I know. That’s all to say that SPF 400 sunscreen doesn’t suffice. So as I settled in, I pulled on my new Tilley Raffia crushable and breathable hat, the one with the highest ultraviolet protection rating of UPF 50+ to block 98% of harmful UVA and UVB rays, backed by a two-year all-perils insurance policy against loss and a Velcro®-sealed secret pocket to hold valuables—the first hat that has ever fit my considerably sized head, and we boated, the only vessel on the lake.

Brooks sliced long oars through water, one hand over top of the other, as I centered my body weight nonchalantly, but with intention.

We visited a large, industrious, impressive beaver dam. “Damn,” I said, trailing my hand beside the boat in the water, like all those women do in movies. “Those beavers are busy.”

“Hence the name,” said Brooks in response, smiling as he rowed.

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

A man named Johnny Depp (you’ve heard of him?) once said: “I’m an old-fashioned guy…I want to be an old man with a beer belly sitting on a porch, looking at a lake or something.” He knows—as do we all—that there is something about being on the water. “A lake,” wrote William Wordsworth, “carries you into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable.” The surface of that water, dipped into. The image of ourselves in waves, mirrors. Ourselves reflected in something with immeasurable depth. There is magic in it, yes, Mr Melville.

I came home that very morning and cleaned off our canoe. Mr Brilliant and I are going boating.

And so, my breakfast journey on Beaver Lake brought me five simple messages:

Always say “yes” to a boat trip. Don’t let overturned boats in your past dictate future adventures.

When surrounded by water, it might be a good idea to step into the center of what can carry you through it. Don’t hesitate, or the boat will move away from the pier and you’ll fall in the gap.

Wear a pullover shirt. Always be prepared for rowing; dress for it, in fact, whether you know if you’ll row or not. Don’t let buttons stand in your way.

Whenever possible, eat breakfast on a lake. On Beaver Lake. In an Adirondack Guideboat. With a friend who knows how to pack a breakfast, how to row, and how to tell a story.

Get as close as you can to the water. Look beneath its surface. You might find yourself there, in someone else’s story. Just maybe. And even if not, you’ll see the reflection of some pretty spectacular clouds.

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[Images from here, here, here, and here]