Friday, September 28, 2007
Kayaking a Great Lake
The young man floating in the kayak next to me is smiling. We’re sitting in two long boats riding the swells a mile out from the shore on Lake Huron, near the Les Cheneaux Islands. Zach is twenty, a tan college kid with sun-bleached blonde hair and little shells in a knotted hemp cord around his neck. He teaches kayak lessons for an eco-tour company out of Hessel, Michigan. “So”, he says, “you ready to flip and try the T-rescue?” Zach had been talking me through basic safety procedures while we paddled away from land. Now I have to tip upside down in a seventeen foot boat in two hundred feet of water. And get back up.
A sea kayak is a long pointy tube only wide as your hips. You carefully slide your feet and legs down through a small cockpit the size of a dinner platter and sit with your rear low under the waterline. The narrow beam of a sea kayak makes it streamlined, fast, and tippy as a greased log. Lose your balance, and your top-heavy torso drops and you hang upside down, underwater, legs wedged inside. I’m a little worried.
Zack is not worried, balanced in his boat like a floating seagull. He explains the “T-rescue”: if you tip over and another kayaker is nearby you slap the bottom of the your kayak three times, wait for the other guy to T-up to your boat, then pull yourself upright using his bow for leverage. “Ok”, Zack repeats, “want to try it?”
“Uh, how about you go first,” I say. He shrugs, leans over, and disappears. Completely. I am suddenly alone on Lake Huron with nothing but waves and the wet underside of Zach’s kayak. Then his hands pop up, slap the hull three times, and wave. I paddle over, a dripping hand grabs my bow and whoosh, Zach comes up sideways like a sea creature. “See?” he grins, water streaming off his chin. “Nothing to it! Now you try.”
I stow my paddle, take a deep breath, lean over slightly and sploosh, I’m upside down in the silent gloom of Lake Huron. The water’s cold. I reach down, which is now up, slap the kayak bottom and wave as calmly as I can. Zach’s bow promptly bumps my hand and I heave myself up sideways, sputtering in the sun again. “Hey, that was pretty good,” Zack says, nodding. You kind of got your arms crossed wrong, but that’ll come. How’d it feel?” How did it feel? Real glad to be on the air side of the lake surface again.
After lunch on an empty island beach, we paddle off the point in a rising headwind under approaching clouds. There, lying on a reef beneath us, the dark mass of a wrecked wooden ship, open ribs reaching up at us from the bottom like curved fingers. We struggle to maintain position over the ship, as if the Lake wanted us off the burial site.
As Zack and I paddle back to the mainland in silence, our long boats do what they do best: slicing through the whitecaps across the Great Lake. For long minutes the waves, our breathing and paddling merge into one rhythmic brotherhood. As if surrounded, perhaps, by Ottawa, Chippewa and Huron who crossed this Great Lake before us. Not with the oily racket of Evinrude and Johnson. But with a paddle, muscle and … humility. Travelling always, but always at the pleasure of the Great Lake.
Education • Nature & Outdoors • Sports & Recreation • Travel • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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April Lidinsky -- More essays by April
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About the series
Michiana Chronicles is a series of radio essays by Jonathan Nashel, Louise Collins, Joe Chaney, Jeanette Saddler Taylor, Jeff Nixa, April Lidinsky, and Ken Smith.
Michiana is the region of north-central Indiana and southern Michigan roughly centered on South Bend, Indiana.
Michiana Chronicles airs on Fridays at 7:35 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. on WVPE (88.1 FM), the home of public radio in Elkhart / South Bend, Indiana.
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