Hiking On Water

It’s an odd sound to like, but it’s one of my favorites — the scraping of the hard plastic belly of my kayak over a few feet of concrete and mud, followed by water lapping against the bottom and sides as I paddle away from the shore.

After what felt like a very long winter, we were finally on the water again.

Don followed behind me, already lost in his music. He loves his earbuds, while I prefer the sounds of outside.

It was already late afternoon when we took to the water at Bluestone State Park, which is a short distance and across a few rivers from where we live. Hinton not only has the New River, but also the Bluestone and Greenbrier rivers as well. I wasn’t in the mood for fast current, so we went to the park, where the water is calm and mostly shallow. We put in at the lake, and then paddled upstream.

Traveling by kayak on this gentle river is like hiking on water. The weather was perfect. Not too hot nor too cold. No winds to fight. No insects. I’m not knowledgeable about plants, but the fragrance from whatever was blooming was so strong it was almost overwhelming, but in a wonderful way.

We ended up going much further than planned, considering it was our first time on the water in months, but it was a little like going for a walk at the beach, when you don’t realize how far you’ve gone until you have to turn back. By the time we returned to the ramp where we parked, it was almost dark.

The next day, Don and I played in the creek behind the camp, arranging large steppingstones to make it easier to cross the water, and then hiked in wet shoes that made the most fantastic sloshing sound with each step. We sat on sun-heated rocks. Took long drags of fragrant air.

On the way back, he paused to tell one runt of a tree that it was prettier than all the others. He’s kind in weird ways like that.

I don’t know that I have ever felt so desperate for green as this year. Even though the winter wasn’t severe, and we had little snow, it felt as if it went on forever. The world was this dry shade of constant brown.

I long to get my hands in the dirt again, to plant and tend and complain about weeds, but we have no yard whatsoever at the warehouse where we live. The building covers every inch of the land. Sometimes, Don and I will attempt to satisfy our dirt cravings by taking on the vacant lot next to our building or the yard at the property we share with his siblings a few miles out of town, but I long for a patch of ground of our own.

I feel fortunate to have had parents who taught me to love the outdoors. Most every childhood vacation was spent in a tent. We hiked and biked and camped and golfed — any reason to be outdoors. Don’s family was much the same.

Mine was a childhood of dirty feet and messy hair, of climbing trees and catching crawdads and snipping barbs off fishhooks to more easily release what we caught. We dammed creeks and played kickball and made our own mud slide.

I think teaching children to love the outdoors is one of the greatest gifts we can give them.

They aren’t going to remember their best day of watching television or hundreds of hours of video games, but they’ll remember the walks in the woods. The feel of toes in the mud. They’ll remember saving tadpoles from a drying puddle, relocating them to safer water. They’ll remember skipping rocks and finding the Big Dipper and learning how to gently pinch-pull the stamen from a honeysuckle bloom to get a drop of nectar.

A mom friend once told me kids can’t bounce off the walls if you take away the walls.

The same goes for adults.