Congenial-speak #6

Musing on the subtext of my May bound political memoir, I meandered my mind to discover the following story in its own right:

Zipping Past Battle Points

 Fibrous tendons sink. A rope meets the shallow depths of Bay Lake, an off-shoot remain from the 1800's Sioux island known as Battle Point. It is a candy-caned eel, a loose, slacked tow-rope that looks for its keel, sweeping slow through weeded green forests of hummed muffled watery murked gasoline tinge. I wait in my orange PFD, my very own collaring flotation device. My small legs, still being trained two walk on my brain's command, flutter above the weeds, mere feet from the bottom of the lake. I watch the boat, I see my mom in her role as observer, looking out across the shadowed bay in her yellow terry-cloth poncho. We are one of the last skiing teams off the lake that evening. The boat trolls its 35-hp outboard around, magically my dad steers and defies the gentle waking nudges of the early lunar tides. Slowly the rope regains its slack, pausing and then becoming tight with a snap that sends feelers out in sound trails on the glassy bay.

 It is the summer of 1974 and, after three summer of road-work with my dad, I attempt to begin my timed stance on water from a seated position. I want to be as much like the skiers as I can. I practiced.  It did not come over night. I began in 1971 behind our row boat, with a 12-hp outboard, lying prostrate on the blue zip sled. Learning lessons hard, after a cerebral trauma in '71s winter, I had to try water skis to know I  could not hold them together. I could not figure out (at 7) that I would never have the coordination to provide the balance and hold the skis together, but far enough apart, to ski. They needed to be parallel, like those bars I had spent many weeks in March walking in PT. Math is not my forte. I have never been good at geometry.

 My friend, my consolation prize, my modus of water operandi, is tilted. The bi-lateral lines on the pads that palpate my feet are submerged, and I realize I am in a part of our  bay just off County Road 10. The general store I walked, I concentrated for a half-mile to get to, is just past the trees to my left. It is like I am in a bath and I can reach the phone, I can see familiar crowed telephone lines. Zippy stores water like a camel. It has a hollow, a widening,  a cistern, a well worn foot. It is simple Archimedean physics. It is weighted water and that which it displaces. I, at that moment, was the sum of Bay Lake, the water my 90-pound wet mass and the sled volumes.

 I look through the murky water, hazing past the distortions of skin color, the lighter brown that had sparked intrigue in a neighbor's eye on Aldrich, now just an arbitrary greenish off-yellow jaundiced hue. The outboard idles, it chokes, my dad disengages the light current, until I find my correct footing. I see myself rising mechanically out of the water like I see the  older, athletic neighbor kid do, like I watch my dad, my sister and my mom do.
 “Tension,” I call, followed by a measured “hit it!” for effect.

My dad lurches the quivering throttle forward. I struggle to rise, to remain standing. The speed mounts instantly and I am staring down a rooster tail, a glass bottomed ceiling that surfaces the bay. It is  impenetrable, infinite, unfathomable, and I am shaking my head to signal a slowing down. There is a release, an abrupt rush of security. I slow and think I will sink, momentarily. It is like the part of a roller coaster ride, after the loops, when your heart falls back to find its missing beats. The ride plays out, gliding past, in desired speed, with time allotted to appreciate the Battle Points.