Kayaking trip, etc.

So I just finished reading "Ammonite" by Nicola Griffith (as recommended by Hannah, of course), and my reality is still cloudy with dream-influences from that book. So here's the dirt on my cloudy reality. My memory being bad, and my problem with the blending of reality and fiction, means that you shouldn't really take me up on this as reality as how you might witness the same events.

The kayaking trip. The waves were gentle swells and the sky was breaking into robin's egg instead of royal blue. The sand was already warm, the water felt like stepping into wet air, and the beach was swarming with tourists before noon. The slim, half-moon, banana kayak bobbed in the water like the crab trap floater-buoys, or the soft-haired head of a drowned young boy. Soaring along the crests of the waves, sliding down again or falling and careening off their edges to create an explosion of sea-water along the bow and back out to sea through the scupper holes. Reaching the middle of the sandbar, we steadied the boat as best we could. I jumped with one knee up, keeping low, turned and slid the rest of the way into my seat in the front. I grabbed both paddles as Hannah jumped and landed on her stomach and clambered her way into the back seat. I handed her a paddle. Logo upright on the left is how you know it's situated correctly in your two hands. The waves coming at us from the front, the beach behind us--cluttered with tourists like so many pieces of trash on the streets of New York--we both set a pace. Using shoulders and arms and core, I dipped one blade kind of sideways and pushed back, then the next, trying not to lean, only to bend, to keep a steady rhythm in time with the waves and the earth beneath the toss of saline water.

We did see birds. Egrets, with their fuzzy white heads, standing still among the reeds, dipping their curved necks, black beetle eyes closed, into the shallow water and through to the sand to search for tiny creatures to crunch in its slim beak; grey herons with their salmon-pink necks and bluish feathers standing among the mangrove trees looking weary; sand-pipers making shrill sounds I'd never heard come from them before, in doubles leading us away from nests, the black strips on the bottoms of their wings revealed as they circled with panicked calls; an osprey, concentratedly surveying the water, swooping at the sight of a fish, and swerving back up after realizing that it was only a glittering shell lying still and dead at the bottom of the shallow inlet; a few other species we didn't recognize, gull and sand-piper and skimmer variants in the shallows all together. The bird preserve on the other side of shell island.

Sometime, we will once again paddle to Fort de Soto, and break at one of their campsites for the day to eat lunch and replenish our water supplies. But the birds were enough for this trip. My arms and shoulders and even my legs have been aching and spasming and cramping for these days after the trip, my justification for the skip-days. But tomorrow, maybe, we'll head out again.

Today, we ventured out to the water a half-hour before sunset. The water was darker then, the waves blown sideways. The moon, gibbous, shining bright even in the pale blue setting sky-light, and I thought maybe it was pulling the current sideways, tricking it into going the opposite way of the waves, which the wind blew towards shore. The sand and the air were cooler than the water, and the sun glowed nuclear-like as it moved towards the horizon. We danced and twisted in the ocean like children, like sand-beasts re-learning how to live in the water out of which their ancestors emerged, until the sun sank slow beneath the sea and the sky turned dark. It was shiver weather on the way home, with high wind and a chill breeze.

Inside the house, the branches scraping like fingernails against the window panes convinced me that there was someone in the dark, a shape of black, an emptiness, watching me, waiting to suck me into the void. Music is the cure for that emptiness. We deny death by drowning it with sound, but it is coming for us all. Someday. But in the meantime, we will dance in the sun and the moon and listen to music and bake cookies and wait.