Halfway to Holy
We took to the water on a Sunday morning.
Seven students, two tour guides, and a professor kayaking down a bayou — it doesn’t quite have the ring of a joke. Maybe I’m just no good at punchlines. Either way, there we were, sunblocked and sun-warmed on the Blind River, aiming to learn about the subsiding land in Southeastern Louisiana and see first-hand what might be lost in the next sixty years, hoping to go home with something to write about.
Our paddles knifed almost silently through the water. There’s a stillness on the river that finds its way into your breath, that far from the freeway. You don’t want to be the thing that disturbs it, so you hush yourself along with the river. Even when we spoke to each other across the gentle current, we kept our voices low, our laughter quiet in the cathedral of the Cyprus trees.
I can’t paddle a kayak without thinking of my dad. He brought me up fishing until he realized I would never enjoy his hobby, and a couple of years ago he bought a kayak for fishing the Susquehanna. He’s found community in that, a group of other men who think a good Saturday morning involves witnessing the dawn with a line in the water, instead of sleeping in. I might not like fishing, but the river, at least, makes sense to me.
My own community was there on the water with me too. Our floating fellowship of writers spread out across the water until our guide, John, called us in to observe some invasive species or natural phenomenon, and then we would reach out to each other. Two kayaks would become one — two, and four, and eight, paddles across the bows to link ourselves together while we listened to him speak.
Before we turned back, our group took our communion with wheat bread and grape jelly on the pier of a hollowed-out hunting cabin. When I wandered past the gaping doorway, there were tattered snakeskins scattered across the floor.
The hours of paddling were burning in my shoulders through the return trip. This time, there were no stops to discuss ecological impacts, though I needed the rest more than I had on the way out. There was less conversation, less gliding over distances, more paddling.
On the way out, we had crossed easily under a low overpass where the train tracks cross the river, then thrashed our way through the thick, invasive salvinia clogging the water. On the way back, we had to dig through the salvinia to get to the overpass, and with no momentum and low clearance, my kayak got stuck at the mouth of the shadowed pass. I tried using my arms to propel me through using the concrete overhead, but my exhausted shoulders refused the effort. Eventually John came back under from the far side and pulled me through by the nose of my boat.
My kayak brushed past his. I was in the clear. And for the first time in over three hours, I forgot to account for my paddle. It smacked into the guide.
As I twisted to free it, I overbalanced. My kayak tipped away from his. My shoulder hit cold water — and then John grabbed the side of the boat, and I blindly gripped the side of his, and after a long moment of certainty that I would roll after all, the kayak was righted. The bottom of my kayak held several inches of water and my entire right side was drenched.
Last year, on one of his fishing excursions, my dad was tossed from his own kayak when he underestimated the force of the river. He called his experience an “accidental baptism.”
Back at the car, I changed into a dry t-shirt I’d had the foresight to pack, but I was left with waterlogged sneakers and damp leggings. If I compared my mishap to my dad’s, it was only half a baptism. I certainly didn’t feel cleansed. Is there such a thing as halfway to holy?
I skipped church for this class trip, and maybe that had me in mind of God, of sanctuary, and of sermons I’d heard in the past few months. Each year, over sixteen miles of land are lost in Louisiana. Each year, almost 10,000 churches close and never reopen their doors. Maybe the same determination to prove our own independence and immortality influences both. Maybe the cliché is true, and we won’t know what we’ve lost until it’s gone. Or maybe we’ll be so far gone ourselves that we don’t realize what it is that’s missing.
Maybe there isn’t supposed to be a punchline to this.
