The River at Night
Yesterday was one of those hot July days that keep me inside. Lucky for me I had the thrilling and heartbreaking women’s soccer game to watch. Then, I needed to be on the river. At ten at night, I drove across the train tracks and into the gravel space near the river. There was a van at the launch and several people chatting on the make shift dock. They too were no doubt looking for cooler temperatures. The lights from Friendship street offered a little help as I unstrapped my boat, slid it off the car and walked it out to the water. It was low tide, the water lapping gently onto the rocks.
It’s a strange thing to launch in the dark. Usually I start my paddles in daylight and journey into the night. But to start in the dark felt a bit odd. What was I paddling toward but more darkness?
The water felt warm around my ankles as I stepped into the river. I twisted on my 360-degree white light that I stick onto the back of my boat. Immediately, bugs flew to the bright light, mobbing my boat. I turned the light off, preferring to move dark and silent through the water.
Though it was low tide, the water was still making a push to the sea. I shoved south with the outgoing current.
“You kayaking?” someone with a drunken slur called from shore.
“Yep,” I called back.
“You should use your light. I’ve run over boats at night,” he said.
I bet you have, I thought. I kept on paddling. The river was calm, empty, wide. The moon had yet to rise.
A mansion on shore—the Pynes—shone lights into the night sky, giving me a sense of life on shore. On the water, I felt the pinpricks of bugs, as I paddled in the shadow of the shoreline that rises to the east. White lights dotted the far shore, and a flashing green light indicated the channel for the bigger boats that move at night. In the distance danced the lights of the Kingston-Rhinecliff bridge (photo at left!)
Paddling in the dark disorients me in intriguing ways. Sounds are amplified and smells become acute. My sense of distance is altered as well as the depth of the water. I often imagine that the river—which is relatively shallow outside of the shipping channel—is hundreds of feet deep. In the dark, I skim the surface as if on a high balance beam.
Smack, a fish flipped just to my right startling me. My heart raced. This smidgen of fear has always been a part of my outdoor adventures. It’s the fear that keeps me alert to all around me. It reminds me of the dangers, which are also the joys of outdoor adventure.
As I neared Magdalen Island, which lay huddled in the dark, the moon rose, a few days past full, a beautiful glowing orange-red lopsided ball. I heard voices from the island and wondered if someone was camping there. Or of someone might be there looting the island. But it was a canoe with a man and woman heading back to Tivoli. I saw their outline in the dark.
“Oh, there’s someone,” he said when I was about fifteen feet away.
“It’s pretty dark to be paddling,” I joked.
And we went our separate ways.
At the end of Magdalen a great blue heron croaked its discontent that I had disturbed its roost for the night. I slushed through the shallow, grass-filled water on the east side of the island. A fish flipped in the water and smacked against the hull of my boat. I let out a cry of alarm. Was it a sturgeon there, lurking in those shallow waters? I liked to imagine the long, primitive fish making its fearless way through the dark.
I chugged my way back north against the tide. A train passing interrupted the silence, blowing its horn, long and insistent. When I pulled out of the water an hour later, the river had worked its magic: the heat of the day was replaced with the lights on shore, the lopsided orange moon, and a rush of excitement at the slap of a fish.