An Afternoon on the Lake

As we approached Lake Natoma, I had concerns. This traffic is awful... how long will it take to get there? It's unusually cool today -- will we be too cold on the water? Life vests and still water aside, my child can't swim -- what if we capsize?

Even worse, as we parked, about 50 people were leaving, but we could see at least 100 more gathered around the center. Would it be too crowded? But we were determined to try it. We had talked about kayaking together as a family for a long time, and now that Sweetie has Fridays off, it seemed that the time was right.

We checked in, got our boats, and got onto the water. As it turned out, it was a little over 80 degrees. The crowd was almost all a summer camp, and they weren't on the water for the most part. The water was exceptionally still and the boats wide. Not to say that they couldn't capsize, but it would take a pretty stupid or careless maneuver.

And as we got about twenty yards out from the dock, Zadie exclaimed, "This is AWESOME." But awesome hadn't even started yet. We tooled around right in the area of the center for a while until it became clear that we could go pretty much anywhere we wanted. We slowly paddled out and out, and soon we approached a flock of murres. We got pretty close before they took flight, skimming the water. We leaned back to watch a raptor glide overhead. We left the company of men and paddled against the water, my tiny daughter in her sunhat leaning against my stomach as my paddle dripped lake water onto her tummy. She didn't mind.

We approached the shore on the near side of the lake and stepped out to dunk in the cool water. There was a shelf about six feet out, so we watched her carefully, but we got ourselves pleasantly cool, and then got back in. This time, Zadie chose to sit with Sweetie. They took off ahead of me and we slid through a line of leaves floating near the surface. We saw more birds and a mother duck and duckling, the baby scuttling over rocks and nearly skipping when he wasn't gliding. I took us to a concrete wall and we navigated around it, barely squeezing through the other side on the way out.

We didn't take a camera out, but the pictures in my mind of the next twenty minutes or so are all similar -- Sweetie in the boat, and Zadie sitting between his knees. No one else is on the water. They both have life vests and floppy sun hats, and in every picture, they are doing the same thing -- looking up to the clouds, holding the paddle, dragging one foot in the water, staring forward against the sun, or leaning back, her head on his stomach. Their positions are the same in each mental snapshot, and I find she is looking more like him these days, her eyes the golden brown I've long loved.

Sweetie suggested that we should try more backwater, so we went out further, then came back along the shore on the far side. We peeked into several coves, stopping in one briefly and poking around several others that went nowhere. I spotted one little alcove whose entrance was half-covered with a fallen tree branch. Sweetie had to turn around, but he followed me in. We slowed down to look around and I dipped my hands in the water. It was shallow, and therefore fairly warm. We talked about it being a good swimming hole. I looked to the left of the entrance and added, "Oh, and hey, are those berries?" There was one small bush, so I looked around to see if there were more. Oh. My. God. Were there ever!

We pulled the boats up onto the shore, stowed our paddles and climbed up the wobbling rocks. They clacked and cracked under our feet, but we didn't slip. Sweetie climbed on ahead and I stayed nearer the boats with Z at my heels. We picked handfuls of blackberries, eating them straight off the vines, carefully avoiding thorns. I would pick a dozen, eat a few, then hold my hand down at my waist for Zadie to grab. She would pluck them up in her finger and thumb one by one, putting them to her mouth as fast as she could. The berry juice ran down my palm and her face. We edged closer to Sweetie, who handed me his berries, which I held out for Zadie as well. I started packing them into my shirt and Zadie and I sat on the hot rocks for a while in silence, eating what must have been three pints of berries.

Sweetie got back in the kayak to clear an area on the edge that was unpassable, and he stopped again to pluck some more. We joined him and ate more as we looked at the flowers I'd never seen, pinwheels of white blossoms like perfect feathery spheres. We exchanged few words, mostly commenting on clusters of perfectly ripe berries just out of reach, the ants guarding certain berries, and the way nostalgia was ringing in our ears, separately, one of us in on the Willamette River and the other on the American. I wondered whether Zadie would remember this perfect moment, and I thought she probably wouldn't. She's only three, after all. But I hope she will. Or I hope we do something so like it enough times in the future that her memories will blend, and she'll think she remembers this first blackberry trip. Or perhaps we'll tell her this story enough times that she will think she remembers it.

Because this? This was the kind of moment that, when someday she is falling in love, she will lean close to her lover and tell them about.