18 March 2009

The Underwater Canoe

By James Dufresne

A whitish blob suspended just beneath the blue-brown water in the afternoon sun leads me to reason that it is the same canoe that two days ago loosed from its mooring and was filled by the heavy early spring rains and dipped down, down, down and disembarked.

As the blob continues on its path midway through the islands’ strait, the mind daydreams about the currents being navigated through the underwater, icy cold after a winter in deep freeze. Who are its paddlers? Who provides the strength to complement the steering?

The sunken canoe makes no noise as it glides, even when beaten upon the underwater boulders forming the foot of the island. Fullness muffles the clunks an empty boat on the surface would drum and echo for all the summer cottage owners who rake their pale lawns.

Afloat, occupants would wave to these laborers and slightly judge neighbors by a yard’s appearance. The condition of the lake bed spoke of lazy tenants --- leaves not raked, the soil swathed with freshwater elodea, fishing gear and dog poop left on the ice that sunk as litter and waste.

The canoe slips past all with no destination, no purpose that people contrive for making such a voyage in a thin vessel. It swims past redds that will soon house bass eggs, silent now as a Great White that lake children imagined lurking behind them as they swam, zigzags of Brownian motion in the liquid clear.

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