In a few hours we will be on the road, returning home to our old selves. The car will be packed. The kids will be snacked. We will be breathing the filtered air of the car as Pennsylvania rolls by under our tires.

But for a couple of hours, while everyone is just starting to rise and the coffee is brewing, I am sitting in a cloud.

The walk down to the lake is quite this morning. The sharp edges of the houses along the street are rounded smooth by the fog that settled over night. As I peek though the trees I can see the fog is much thicker out on the water. Standing on the dock I can see less than fifty feet ahead of me. Along the shore off to my right someone has set up a tent on a little peninsula that sticks out into the lake. I do my best to slip my kayak into the water silently.

35mm Flic Fusion 200 ISO in a Sears KS 500

As I paddle out into the fog I start to question if this is safe. It's six in the morning and I'm sure I'm the only one on the water, but I can't see the other shore. I can't even see the middle of the lake. The fog is so thick it feels like something from a movie. I imagine paddling out into the fog, losing sight of the shore, and coming out somewhere else. Somewhere years in the future when no one remembers me.

Because there is no sky to be reflected on the water I can see much further down than I usually can. The brown/blue/green of the lake water is clear now. I can see my paddle stirring up little clouds along the bottom.

To my right are a series of boathouses. Their colors rendered in a wash of pale watercolor by the morning air. To my left the world ends abruptly in a wall of white and grey.

I feel like I'm intruding. Like walking into a bookstore before they open. I'm surprised that it's not silent. In the morning quiet a few sounds travel unopposed across the surface of the water.

A distant truck engine climbing up the hillsides. The woeful cry of a loon on the far end of the lake.

I have come prepared this morning. My old camera sits in a gallon sized Ziplock bag between my knees. I have rolls of film tucked into my pockets. My waterproof digital camera is balanced on my lap where I can reach it quickly.

As I work my way around the tip of Scott's Point the lake houses along the cove come into view. These houses that I have seen so many times are strangers this morning. They emerge one by one, like faded memories.

Leaving the shore behind the world is blue/grey below. The fog purples above in the first light of day. As far as I can see in any direction there is nothing. The yellow of my boat is the only anchor to reality.

Suddenly it sounds like the air is ripping just over my head. I fold myself forward, crouching low into the belly of the boat. A 'V' of ducks swoops right over my head and circles down in formation to land.

A dark shadow in the fog behind them is the far bank, and sitting in the middle of that is a little yellow pinprick of light. As I get closer I can make out a lake house sitting like a guard tower among the pines.

The sky is getting lighter at this point. The stubborn fog begins to lift. I look behind me and the end of Scott's Point emerges from the retreating cloud like a mythical island.

With the reassertion of reality my confidence waxes, and I set out into the middle of the lake. The morning is waking up all around me. There are more distant car sounds. I can vaguely hear someone's alarm going of. The pulse of it's buzzing calling out to the day.

Each mechanical click of my camera’s shutter marks one less picture I will get to take while I'm here. The hours left are down to just minutes now. I know my time here is coming to an end.

I try in vain to etch all of this on the walls of my soul. The smell of the air. The alien feeling of being untethered in the fog. I am stealing this one last moment on a day defined by ending. I am grasping at it, trying to save it inside of me. I know that no matter how hard I try it will slip between the fingers of my memory and spill out on the trail of time behind me.

I will lose this. That is what makes this meaningful. Despite that I pray. I pray to the universe, my uncaring future selves, the ceaseless flow of time. Please let me keep this.

But the alarm is ringing. The car is probably getting packed by now. There are things I need to be doing. My old self reaches it's long shadowy arm out from my living room back home and taps me on the shoulder.

It's time to go.

As I turn and paddle back home the sun rises fully and breaks over the hillsides. The lake lights up in biblical rapture. I sit in this moment that will be lost, all the sweeter in it's flight.

The lake will not remember me. For all my trying, I will not remember either, for someday I will give all this up and become a memory too. But forever etched in time is this moment. Unchanging. Once there was this place. Here I was.

Here I Was

Between Two Worlds