A bird watching club got me into my first kayak seven years ago. Someone, a member, had posted a Meetup promising an over-the-water tour of bird habitats on the local lake named for Ladybird Johnson, a woman who loved wild places enough to help protect them. Neon-colored kayaks often skimmed across that lake, the V’s they cut on the surface reminding me of the figures children and artists often drew to represent birds in flight. So I went, lured by the gravity-defying possibilities that water might hold.
I donned a life vest, butt-flopped from the dock into a kayak and buried an enthusiastic paddle into the water. I did not yet know to hold my elbow at a 45-degree angle. Or that dipping rather than digging my paddle would get me where I wanted to go faster and also keep me drier. Swimmer’s muscle memory made me pull my arms hard against the lake and scoop water straight into my kayak. Following the other birdwatchers—mostly women and a few men—I craned my neck to watch geese, ducks swans and the grackles I mistook for crows. But it was a lone silver egret that stole the show and my attention. Rapt at the sight of the egret beating its wings over the lake as it moved from tree to tree, I forgot the wetness that pooled at the bottom of my boat and soaked my clothes to the skin.
Of course I returned again not long after that first time, undeterred, this time without my gaggle of birdwatchers. They’d decided to meet on land and I wanted to be on the lake again because I’d fallen in love with kayaking and wanted to learn to enjoy the surface of water, the way it interacted with other spaces. The swimmer in me already understood the underside well. It was a space that demanded focus and a willingness to let go of smell and every sound except that of your own breathing. The surface was a different matter, a space where all senses could engage.
I rented another one-person kayak. The time before, I’d had the choice to take a double but declined. A single would let me stay with the group and follow or break off, as I knew my contrarian spirit would demand. Seeing birds, learning their names and learning to distinguish which cry or call belonged to which bird—all that had its pleasures. But what I really wanted was to test my own wings, finesse my strokes and turns, paddle upstream and glide under the bridges and in and out of the small green coves along the shore. And that meant a level of physical engagement with the water I could not have following binocular-eyed birdwatchers. For all their inexperience with kayaks, still managed to stay drier than I did by allowing the current push them along.
Paddling more deliberately and taking in less water into my boat, I passed a Southern gothic tangle of cedar elms sycamores and cypress, catching sight of nests that belonged to birds. Under bridges and on them, colorful graffiti—like the blind yellow Pac-Man on the Lamar Boulevard Bridge that vowed to Never Give Up—reminded me of other forms of wildlife. The hairless, mammalian kind that build as relentlessly as beavers, but didn’t always live in harmony with nature. These other animals that looked like me—they were more numerous than birds. And try as I might, I could not avoid them. As the temperatures rose, they sought the water, too. Some paddled in tandem with varying degrees of finesse. Others paddled past me alone or with canine companions in life jackets, front paws perched on the bow, noses tipped to the wind, reveling in scents no human could detect.
This time, I watched the tandem kayakers with particular interest. Men paired with men and women with women; but it was the male/female pairs I watched most closely, especially the ones where the men steered and the women sat behind. Some moved along well, if slowly; others not so much. I wondered if those couples, especially the more obviously inexperienced ones that relied on the current more than their paddles to push them along, knew that brawn didn’t matter here. What did was skill level, with the more experienced kayaker in front and the less experienced one in back. I wondered, too, how these pairs—any of them—could stand sitting between the someone’s splayed legs or having someone sit between their own. Kayaks are compact spaces; and while some might take comfort in contact, to me it would feel like too much constraint.
In a single kayak and despite the relative immobility of my legs, I could still push the boat as fast as the muscles in my core, shoulders and arms would allow. And that my less-freighted kayak would always move more quickly than tandems. I could go where I wanted when I wanted, without seeking permission or consensus. And I could own every last act and decision, for better or worse, like going too far up or down the river and getting fined for not returning to the dock on time. Or forgetting sunscreen. Or water to drink. And if I invited the lake into my kayak from sloppy strokes, I could still enjoy the cool wetness on my skin and through my clothes like the blessing it ultimately was.
I don’t know that I’ll ever try tandem kayaking. There’s pleasure—or comfort or security or all three—being among others. Ducks know this. So do geese and swans, who rarely swim the lake alone. So did my father, another bird I could neither catch nor keep, who desired the company of others but also paddled his own way. He’d tell me, the child too much like him, that I would end up alone if I didn’t learn to compromise. Of course, he rarely did and didn’t have to because he was a man; and I’d laugh at the irony he did not see, knowing he was probably right. But knowing, too, it was my choice.
And so I’ll keep paddling my kayak built for one because I prefer it like the silver egret prefers its solitude. An airy thing, it sometimes drags the big yellow feet at the end of its backward-bending legs in the water. The birdwatchers told me it does this to stir up the water and attract the fish it will eat, but I imagine more: that somehow, some way, those crazy feet keep the egret connected to what also feeds its soul.