On Lake Sylvan

On Lake Sylvan, the canoe laid tipped over, upside down, on the sea-weedy shore. We pushed & we pulled & we worked it until we saw an oar sticking out from underneath. Grabbing the oar, we tugged & we pulled until we finally had it out from under the trap of the canoe. We splashed & skimmed the water with it, ocassionaly scooping up some seaweed & slinging it skyward.
Laughing, giggling, summer-time fun.
Two tones echoed across the 12 acre lake.
My mothers' flat two-tone whistle. We climbed the bank, throwing the oar by the canoe & waved up at her. She hollered back....''Don't get in the water.'' She's told me a hundred times before. She can't swim. If something happens, she can't jump in and save me. There's water moccassins. There's alligators.
Sitting atop of the bank, I plop my foot up on the handle of the oar which is sticking up from it's spot between the embankment and the edge of the canoe. Tiny & I prattle on, like little girls do, about things like how planes are like fingernails scratching the dry surface of the sky. Wrapping my toes around the handle of the oar, I rock it back & forth with the tempo of our day...until it slips from under my toes. The oar has pushed the end of the canoe a couple of feet into the water.
Eyes go wide, mouths drop, then curl into grins.
We scurry down the embankment...and into the water. Once there, we discovered that we now had much better leverage to flip that canoe & flip it, we did! With our one oar & our collected 12 years of life experience, we headed out.
A turtle's head would bop up out of the water & we would head towards him. A fish would jump & we would head that-a-way. Finally, we chose the center of the lake as our destination & to the center we went.
We laid back, toe to toe. Talked again about planes scratching the sky. We wondered if rain was the sky finally crying from getting scratched everyday. We drifted & we drifted & finally we arose, sleepy headed, when we could hear a muted lapping of the water.
We had drifted to a far shore. A shore without houses. A shore filled solid with seaweed. We took the oar and stabbed down into the thick, magical, green slime. It was deep, real deep. So deep & thick of it, we hadn't the strength to pull the oar up with the load we had spun. We looked at each other & Tiny's eyes began to swell.
I let the seaweed sliiiiide back off of the oar...."it's just seaweed''
''It's all around us.''
''It's ok''
Then she stood.
''Don't rock the boat."
She belted out in tears & her whole body shook.
I thrust the oar into the seaweed and started stroking as quickly as I could through the thick & resistant seaweed.
She was full-throttle crying now, shaking, pointing.....''There's owl-leg-aters!"
I froze.
Bubbles in the seaweed, for an instant, did indeed look like alligator eyes looking back up at us.
''It's seaweed. We're almost back to the water. Just a few more feet.''
And in just a few more feet, everything changed.
Tiny jumped out of that canoe, tipping it & tossing me.
With seaweed in our hair, we struggled for a moment....tried to salvage the canoe, but it was as if our paddling caused it to travel deeper into the seaweed.
We had to swim. Clear across that lake.
Loosing my breath, arms and legs going numb, spitting water, shifting from swimming to floating & back again...I wondered if we would make it.

The summer before I turned seven, I had learned the importance of Sink or Swim
and I have been swimming ever since.

*current pic of Lake Sylvan compliments of WWW