Waverunning

After a very hard week of working in the yard, setting up the yard sale, writing dissertation chapters, and completing various projects, Andrew and I fixed up the jetski and went waverunning at Sardis Lake. There's something so odd about being in the middle of a big body of water. I always feels like hope is the only thing keeping me afloat. Nothing feels more tenuous, like one wrong sneeze could toss me in the water, never to be seen again. But there's something really defiant about the experience too, like despite everything I know about the properties of water and the body, I'm still on top of the waves. It's amazing.

When I'm riding, I like to imagine what would happen if I stopped at one of those floating lake islands and camped there for the rest of my life. I picture fashioning sticks into spears and pilfering cornmeal from boathouses and frying catfish for three meals a day and loving it. In my daydream, it's never winter, or raining, and no one ever finds me, and I'm ok with that. Then I think of one of my favorite books, Life of Pi, where the floating island turns out to be carnivorous. That always ruins my fantasy.

I like to think of a name for the color of a lake when you look down into it and you can see through the top layer of water but not beyond it, a translucent/opaque conundrum I have always wanted to describe but couldn't. Opaluscent, perhaps.

My favorite thing to do on a waverunner isn't to jump waves; it's to cut the engine and lie back on the seat, which is always so hot that the vinyl sticks to my wet back, but it doesn't matter because lake water is freezing until July. I like to look straight up at the sky where I can't see any land around me and imagine I'm in the ocean with nothing around for miles and miles.

This is pleasant until a motorboat runs me over, or some vindictive skier glides by and splashes my open eyes with lakewater. But most days this doesn't happen and I get to go home and bask in languid sun-exhaustion, that exuberantly happy feeling that can be likened to a cross between eating too much chocolate but not feeling sick about it and being shot with codeine but skipping the hazy, addictive side effects.