The Kayaks came to Rebel's Isle last summer and our life at the cottage was changed forever!

We were in town provisioning for two blissful weeks of mid summer holiday. This day was blistering hot - enough to make you dizzy; boil your brain. Through the heat wave shimmering off the pavement swam a wild patch of colour; a sign of something momentous about to happen. The sign read “Cottage Toys - midseason sale!” Ann plunged into the mirage towing me to a pavillion where windy hot gusts were blowing the displays about and the tent walls were snapping. The displays were filled with life jackets, clothes, hats, paddles and water toys. They had every imaginable cottage toy. There was a floating inflatable living room complete with beverage holders, Laz-E- Boys for the lake? There were trampolines for bouncing, tubes for tubing, and kayaks.

Kayaks!

All season, for many seasons, we’d gazed with envy from our screened porch overlooking the water as the kayakers slid by in single file. We wondered at the smooth silent way they cut through the dimpled morning mirror. What must it be like? How does it feel to glide so neatly along? Wanting to be one of them, but never, it seems, enough to actually go out and get a pair. Then came this day. Kayaks of all kinds were strewn about the lawn with open cockpits inviting us to sit and thrust our long legs into their hulls and imagine the open water ahead. It was like a dream; our heat-addled brains could wait no more. The time was right, the day was right, the price was right. Soon we were proud owners of two brightly coloured beginner kayaks, waiting eagerly for delivery to the lake. Later that day with the breeze dying and the water settling into the evening’s glassy calm we snapped into our life jackets, grabbed our paddles and dragged our vessels to the shallow waters of the swimming rock for kayaking lesson 101, self-taught. I went first. Getting into a kayak is like mounting a bucking bowl of jello. Put weight on any part of it and it squirms from under you. Every move is answered with a counter-move. Stepping in, it scoots away, and it’s a good thing the water is shallow. I tried straddling it between my skinny legs and bracing my hands on either side of the cockpit. The kayak fought back with an evil rocking motion and once again slid from under me. Finally with a desperate lurch I dropped backward into the seat and by some miracle failed to capsize. I learned in due course that the kayak was only kidding, it was never really going to tip over. The way to react to a kayaks tippy ways is to not react at all. Go with it, but be quick and precise because it won’t wait for you. With a clumsy backward flop I was in and floating. A kayak feels nothing like a boat or canoe. In boats and canoes you sit up looking out over the water. In a kayak you are floating in the surface tension like a water bug. You are not on the surface, you are part of it. Everything the water does, you do. In a boat you cut through the waves; in a kayak you are the wave. Until your inner ear adjusts and you begin to trust, it’s a precarious tippy feeling and you overreact to every movement. But soon you realize you can lean a long way without tipping and calm settles in. I tried a timid stroke of the paddle and shot backward away from shore. Ann was doing her own version of the whoopsie-dance as she flopped into her chartreuse vessel. For safety we’d opted for really gaudy colours. Soon we were paddling a somewhat zig-zaggy course close in and parallel to the shore, feeling vulnerable, unstable, but savouring a new thrill. One tiny trip at a time we began to get the hang of it. Our paddling became more efficient, more straight-lined and we began to venture farther out on the open water. There are places I could never get the boat into that became our play grounds; the shallow marshy back waters where water lillies bloom, full of frogs and fish, and things below that make puffs in the mud. We sneak noiselessly along morning shores more intimate with the lake than ever before. I avoid getting too close in my bass boat when people are on their docks so as not to intrude. In a kayak I can pass as close as I want and they will wave and smile a greeting. We’re more like passing waterfowl than boaters. We are just as quiet and we don’t stay long. Week by week our range extended as our paddling muscles hardened and our technique became more refined. And then the leaves turned and it was time to close for the winter. Sitting in a city room with snow out the window I can drift off to the shuttered boat house where the kayaks are wintering, lying on their backs on the wooden floor. The life jackets hang from their pegs in the wall and the paddles stand sentry in the corner. A fragment of Spring light spills around the edge of the drawn green shade. It’s April and soon we’ll skip again like brightly coloured bugs across the water, on our way to the far reaches of a lake we never fully knew in twenty seven years on Rebels Isle.