I can't canoe
I love the water. I love to swim. I love to boat. I love to bob around in the waves. Apparently, I can't steer a canoe to save my life.
We were at a lake party at this nice little lake near Brewster, NY. The lake is a bit clogged with lilly pads and stuff growing. You know, plant stuff. We'd be in the middle of the lake and look down and see tops of weird water plants a few feet below the surface. Neat, yet creepy.
The whole plants-in-water-thing does freak me out a bit. The thought of falling over into a lake where little seaweed-esque plants would be surrounding my body is borderline nightmarish. The thought of touching the bottom of a lake creeps me out, too.
Lorne-Doone cookies creep me out.
Evan and I are at this party and decide it will be really cool to grab the canoe, go out and explore. I somehow got in the position of steering. Robin, who is throwing the shindig, tells us of a cool little canal that we can row through that connects to the neighboring lake. Neat!
We get out in the water, and immediately realize that our collective steering is not working at all - unless, by 'working' you mean swerving around like drunks.
In the middle of the lake, we look down and see the previously mentioned plants underwater. Wacky.
We swerved our way to the opening of the 'canal'. Actually, canal isn't the right word - canal sounds manmade. This is just a very curvy passage between the two lakes, barely as wide as the length of our canoe (does that make sense? If the canoe is 20ft long, the canal is barely that wide). It was fairly long, too... maybe half a mile? It's hard to gauge in a canoe.
Evan, who is older and therefor I assumed wiser, thinks that we should go as fast as possible through the passage. We go fast, but the canal is too curvy and we are smacking into the shoreline, which is full of trees and bushes and things that like to scrape your skin. And bugs.
It was like a jungle there.
Then we decided to go slower, but still were crashing into the trees. Then we tried to work out various systems of rowing, which all failed, usually because Evan would turn around and say, "you are rowing on the wrong side again" and he would be looking at me and not where we were headed, which was always into a bush. Crash.
Halfway through the canal, there is a bridge you have to go under. It's really low to the water and we had to squish down into our canoe and use our hands to pull our boat through. And there were spiders everywhere.
The rest of the way was much like the first half. Both of us crashed into the shoreline too many times and got scratches all over. The lake on the other side was just like the lake we had left.
There is no point to this story, just that it was really pretty and serene there, and you could easily imagine that you were some sort of explorer going this way for the first time. And I can't steer a canoe.
