My Life Adrift

My life, the only life I have, is speeding by. Days that felt like weeks now feel like hours, and those weeks? Well, they feel like days. Seasons rush over me and before I can right myself from their initial force, they’ve left and made way for the next. Spring hurls into summer, and summer into fall. I’ll pick an apple, eat it, and before I can throw the core into the weeds alongside the orchard path winter will have arrived. Even winter, with its desolate misery unfolds more quickly than it used to. Seasons come and seasons go, but their stay seems shorter as my years stack higher. I have no means by which to combat this phenomenon, no magic pill that can slow this thing down. My children are growing faster than they did before, and well intentioned words from strangers that told me to be grateful for this time of my life before it leaves me are finally being understood. My life is a life in fast forward, and the rat race has indeed become a race.

We know how this race ends. It’s a race to the death. My fatalistic views on my own life cause me to live it slightly differently than most. I find time to work, obviously, but I find time to play as well. I wondered last night, on the edge of a tipping sailboat with my daughter at the tiller, if my blood pressure, on aggregate, would measure lower in the summer than it does in the winter. I thought about this for a while. And before I could settle upon a reasonable position, the pier was coming into view and the wind had abandoned our sail and our night was over. I didn’t think about that question again until just now.

I know my blood pressure is lower during certain points of my week, and I’ve come to the conclusion that my place is most definitely on the bow of a boat in the middle of this open lake. I started off this boating season early, earlier than you and earlier than everyone you know. By May first I had already spent a season boating, fishing, enjoying, and swimming. These early fishing trips took place mostly in the morning, under dark skies made light only after my engine had belched blue smoke and my poles were set. These morning trips were fun, sure, but they were more of a forced adventure over cold waters where I aimed to find deep water fish in the shallows than they were leisurely outings spent on introspection. I have also explored the world of evening boating, and evening fishing. Fishing that I wrote about last week, the sort that lasts deep into the night and where success isn’t measured by the number of caught fish but by the temperature of the wind and the caliber of the sunset.

The outings that will define my summer, the outings that have captivated me, are the most humble and simple. I admit to being easily captivated by things involving Geneva, and if you’ve been reading along with me for some time, you didn’t need me to tell you that. I find a certain joy out of bobbing on my lake, and better than early cold mornings and increasingly seasonable evenings are sultry afternoons spent adrift. My procedure is simple, my aim varied, and my execution nearly, inevitably, flawless.

I can sit on my boat, the boat pictured above, and draw relief from the thought of what exactly it is that lies beneath me. If the depth finder registers 120 feet of depth, and I, in my little white boat, drift carelessly for an hour in any direction, what sorts of things have I unknowingly drifted over? Minnows usually find my boat, the motor end typically, and seek shelter near the surface and near my boat, a protection that I am happy to provide. Are there fish under them, waiting to strike as a marlin might a school of herring, deterred by nothing except the greenish bottom of my white boat? Could there be more fish under those- a larger species, perhaps cisco, huddled in a tight ball to suggest size, roaming through the deep in water of just the right temperature?

And what about the water beneath that? 120′ is a lot of water, after all, it’s a depth that most natural lakes fail to achieve, increasing my curiosity as to what takes place down there. Are there lake trout in schools? Swimming back and forth, from point to point, chasing the large cloud of ciscos that are above them, waiting for one to exhibit signs of weariness or some other untold weakness so that they might swim up and greedily devour it? Or is there just but one Laker under that dutiful boat, moving slowly in the depths, oblivious to the temperature changes that occur throughout the 100′ of water that lies between his fins and my hull? Is the bottom gravel, like I picture it to be, or is it covered in a fine silt, dirt carried from farmers fields through streams and over lawns before finally coming to rest at the bottom of this great tomb of water? I can’t say for sure.

But what if it isn’t just a school of cisco and a lone lake trout beneath the surface where my boat rests, what if the scene under me is a Guy Harvey painting come to life, in freshwater form, with various baits and various predators all working in symphony to represent the cycle of life that we know exists in theory? Are fish stacked in this watery column, each in its own preferred temperature, larger fish toward the bottom, minnows towards the surface, water spanning from 42 at the bottom to 81 on the surface, floating still in this column until hunger forces a trip to warmer waters and tasty prey? Is this chain taking place below my boat as I sit, contemplating who I just called or who I still need to call, wondering if one of these great fish might strike the lures that I routinely dangle in front of them, or if they just swim past and snicker at the flaws in my presentation. Do they know that I don’t fish to actually catch but rather that I fish in the same way that others play the lottery? I don’t really intend to catch these deep fish in this manner, but the thought that one day I might is more than enough to erase my memory of all the days that I have not. Am I oblivious to this magical life that I’m resting atop of? Or is there nothing below that boat at all, just a depth of water and a few old charred steamships that sank to the bottom as a result of an overzealous coal fire.

These are the moments that I think about, the moments that attempt to plug the life that I’m leaking at an alarming rate, and just relaying them to you now has calmed me in a way that one day you too could understand, if only you’d excuse yourself from your all consuming life once in a while. It’ll patiently wait for you to return, as mine always does.