posted by Paige on Uncategorized

No comments

Summer, 1988 / Nine years old

Dipping my paddle into the dark water, I guide the canoe toward the widest part of the lake, just the way my grandfather has taught me. The night air reverberates with the steady hum of cricket song punctuated here and there by throaty bullfrog calls.

Despite the drought, humidity burdens the air with a heaviness that makes daytime scarcely bearable. But some nights a relative coolness ascends, as if the ground itself takes enough pity on us to offer up some small measure of its dank freshness.

 Reaching the center of the lake, I stop and let my eyes sweep over my surroundings. The water’s edge is fringed so heavily with trees that the lights from the houses ringing the lake barely penetrate. Laying the paddle flat across the boat’s metal rim, my mind turns to my grandfather’s stories of anchoring his canoe out here and sleeping in it for the night. I consider lying down in the boat’s bottom, but remembering how dusty it is I instead tilt my head and lean back to observe more of the sky.

Taking in the full expanse overhead, my breath is at once shocked from my body. All the velvety space I’m accustomed to seeing in brighter suburban skies is now speckled, splashed, scattered with innumerable luminous pinpricks. I inhale deeply, letting the wet, earthy scents of the lake and its surroundings fill me up as my eyes consume this unfamiliar expanse of sky.

An image springs to mind of my dad before me, of his parents before him—of each of us having come out onto this little lake alone, each of us surely having had nearly this same experience. Who am I in relation to all of that, to the family name I carry? I say my full name to myself, repeating it over and over again, its sounds filling my head until it dissolves into mere syllables—empty, meaningless, ridiculous.

Suddenly it’s almost as if I’m suspended, my own identity a separate and scarcely recognizable thing. I’m a human animal sitting in a metal vessel, surrounded by water and the fathomless spread of a summer night sky. All of it matters and none of it matters. Unmoored, I float in this place of knowing and not-knowing. It seems my own name is not who I am. This is a wholly new idea, and utterly terrifying. If I’m not my name, my identity, then who am I? It’s as if I’m untethered, drifting solitary in an unknown world.

I pull my attention to the boat again, to the night breeze grazing my skin, to the smell of seaweed and the rustle of trees. Turning the canoe, I point its bow toward my grandparents’ dock, and within minutes I’m once again binding the rope to its friendly wooden sturdiness.

From up the slope, the warm lights of the house beckon me back to the familiar, to the familial, to all I already know