SOUTH
Have indeed come back from ON satisfactorily scathed; am now off to the west coast of FL for quasi-festive infusions of sunshine, tryptophan, and cranberry sauce in the shape of a can. Travel notes and evasive elaborations forthcoming.

NORTH

Am off to see my familiar, yet somehow strange girlfriend for the weekend. Will surely not return unscathed.

MANTRA FOR THE DESKBOUND
c. Feb. 2003

I
Your occupation need not occupy you. It slips from you like water from a leaf. It doesn’t bend you low before the ground. It breezes through your branches easily.

II
You needn’t weigh concerns upon your shoulders. The tasks you face are wholly unimportant. Your difference of view advances nothing. All you do will be discarded presently.

III
The people that surround you are but ghosts. They cannot care about the world you see. Make way for them to slip around and past you. The matters that excite them are not yours.

IV
But humor them and grant them what they ask for. What bother you incur will pass the time. Consider it but something else to do. Reflect on the futility of countering.

V
The things that impact you will not persist. Do not fall into caring what you do. Disown what you expend your effort on. The truth is not a language spoken here.

ASCENT OF MANATEE, continued
a flashback to June 2003, Key Largo, Florida

Piloting a kayak, or at least a two-seater kayak, it turns out, is not very difficult. Hardly worth the trepidation I’d felt before sitting in the thing. With four arms paddling you slice quite quickly through the water; with a hair-trigger foot rudder you maneuver very nimbly.

The rudder was my department, given that I was the one in the rear of the kayak. I operated it via the pair of springloaded foot pedals located somewhere down inside my leg compartment, detectable only by feel. I could not seem to get the hang of the super-complicated system of move-right-foot-to-turn-right and move-left-foot-to-turn-left; by some unhelpful reflex I kept pressing with the wrong foot, thus incessantly sending us in the wrong direction for a moment before my error dawned on me. Clearly some wires crossed in the old upstairs re foot-eye coordination.

Once out on the water, we swung the kayak around the perimeters of some of the islands we saw, doing recon, scanning the underbrush for inlets that would allow us ingress. Adhering to my brother’s plan of action, and despite my protests, we then navigated our way up through a few of the islands’ winding channels, and each time, the outside outdoor world seemed to vanish behind us, as though a curtain had been drawn over the entrance.

The waterways were claustrophobically narrow (maybe twelve feet across at their widest), twisty, muggy, thickly overgrown with trees, devoid of human habitation, and eerily silent and serene. The only sounds around us were the quiet ripplings and splashes of our paddles dipping in and out of the water. Every now and then the cry of a bird, or an insect’s dry chirps and clacks, or the distant Dopplering roar of a jetski somewhere out on the bay.

The banks on either side of us were profusely lined with innumerable spidery mangrove roots, spindly and flesh-colored and curling out and down like fingers. Over our heads at all times was an immense canopy of leaves and snarled branches, permitting no direct sunlight through, keeping us perpetually in the shade. The air and water were very still; there was neither breeze nor current. Our kayak glided over the unmoving water as though on the surface of a pond.

Our movement through the water was often checked by tree trunks and branches that snaked crookedly out of the overhead vegetation and down into the water, which trunks and branches we kept having to swerve around and/or duck under; my left-right confusion with the rudder resulted in my steering the kayak directly into more than a few of these obstacles, to the ever-escalating irritation of my brother, who was sitting up front and thus tended to bear the brunt of such collisions, viz. a faceful of viney branches and/or intimate contact with buggy tree bark.

Kayak Bob had warned us with unconvincing ominousness before we left that the mosquitoes up in those overgrown island waterways had the potential to get rather dense and aggressive, and so maybe we might consider hosing our persons down with copious amounts of Off bug spray, available for a reasonable price right there in the Kayak Bob rental shanty. We said thanks but no thanks, we’d take our chances. I did indeed meet with some mosquitoes, but hardly air-darkening swarms of them: just the occasional one whining in my ear, or landing thirstily on the back of my brother’s neck. We were usually moving too fast over the water for the bugs to get much of a grip. Though I did hear my brother react with disgust when a just-swatted mosquito bled his own red blood back all over his skin.

We eventually found the aforementioned Lost Lake and met a manatee while in it. The manatee was coy about announcing its presence. When my brother and I were still threading our way up the channel, approaching the sunlit clearing up ahead that we suspected signaled the mouth of the Lost Lake, we saw a sudden upswelling of water several yards in front of us, i.e. something moving beneath the surface. We saw it at the same time and both said Whoa and jammed our paddles into the water, stopping the kayak in its tracks and backpaddling a bit. (I of course assumed an alligator or a plesiosaur or possibly the Kraken.) Nothing appeared, however, and the upswell’s ripples calmed down, and we continued forward into the lake, gingerly paddling over where the water had been disturbed.

Once we were in the lake proper, after a few minutes of exploratory paddling around, I looked behind me and saw, maybe twenty or thirty feet away, a rotund whiskered manatee snout emerge from the water, snuff an audible breath through its nostrils, then submerge again. Nautical folklore has it that sailors of old used to mistake manatees for mermaids; if this is to be believed, then presumably those seafaring types preferred their mythical women lumpy, leathery, and rather on the stubbly side.

I suppose the Lost Lake itself was notable merely for its existence — the shady canopy of the winding water channel giving way to this bright open-air lake, a few hundred yards long by maybe a hundred wide, enclosed here in utter seclusion in the middle of these jungly woods, nothing on the banks but trees right up to the edge of the water, no beach or dock or signs, etc. — but it was not in and of itself very attractive or interesting-looking. It looked and felt kind of dead. It seemed Lost with decent reason.

There was no other route out of the lake, so we turned back the way we came, retracing the channel’s long wriggling path back out to the bay. From there we then aimed the kayak directly at our distant hotel’s waterfront and raced the afternoon’s gathering rainclouds back to it. And very nearly won.

ASCENT OF MANATEE
a flashback to June 2003, Key Largo, Florida

Kayak Bob was all huffing and puffing and twisting and tugging over this padlock, but he could not manage to unlock the lock on the loops of Hulk-grade heavy-duty chain encircling his rack of fruity-colored canoes, one of which canoes my brother and I were attempting to rent from him. We stood there and watched him work. The keys apparently would not turn.

After a few too many minutes of struggle, Kayak Bob threw it in, and he set down the still-locked lock and stood up to catch his breath and jangle his keys in resignation. He turned to us and apologetically told us that since the canoes were evidently off the menu for today, he would instead give us a two-man kayak at the canoe-rental price. Saving us five dollars.

This made me unhappy. I had plenty of canoeing experience, and even a modicum of outdoorsy enthusiasm for the activity, but I had never been in a kayak before, and was apprehensive at the prospect of doing so, since the one time I’d seen a novice kayaker attempt to even get into his vessel, let alone sit upright in it or perform forward locomotion in it, the poor dude had just repeatedly barrel-rolled the thing and dunked himself into ice-cold lake water with such rhythm and regularity it looked like he was being roasted on a spit.

My having observed this event impressed on me the sense that the kayak took some skill and some getting used to, and but here my brother and I were about to get our crash course in kayaking, not in a shallow day-camp creek or a quaint wooded vacationer’s lake, but in a vast brackish swampy Floridian bay the color and stench of a giant polluted mud puddle, a bay absolutely foaming with drunk-captained speedboats and sinister aquatic creatures and ghastly submerged stinging vegetation, back behind the chicken- and lizard-infested Howard Johnson our family was staying at during our two days in Key Largo.

Kayak Bob showed us to our kayak. I looked at it and was 100% positive that we would capsize and be eaten by alligators. I had not really even wanted to go canoeing, having already had my fill of adventure for the day — we’d just gotten back from having spent a few hours snorkeling, and my back was smarting from sunburn and my stomach was churning from all the seawater I drank — but my brother had gotten this let’s-rent-a-canoe thing into his noodle and had then resorted to an old attrition trick from his toddler days, i.e. badgering me over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again whereupon after time my temporal lobe began deteriorating into a soft jelly and I was compelled to give in. All right, I would go canoeing. Canoeing I could do. Now the canoe was gone. Now we would be shoehorning our lower bodies into an unfamiliar, unsteady smallish plastic tube that sat mostly underwater and seemed poised at any moment to roll us both over into the drink at the merest shift in weight or encounter with a boat wake.

But we would not just be paddling idly around the bay. Earlier, outside the little “Kayak Bob” rental shack, Kayak Bob had shown us a whiteboard with a map crudely drawn on it in dry-erase marker, which map displayed an aerial view of the bay’s various small uninhabited islands. Threading throughout the islands here and there were multicolored dotted lines, which indicated the routes you were free to explore via your canoe or kayak: thin, shallow, flora-canopied arterial waterways that wound their way complexly through the islands’ undergrowth and then (one hoped) let you out elsewhere in the bay. One of the islands on the map, the one that’d captured my brother’s attention, featured what was dramatically labeled the “Lost Lake” — a large inland body of water located somewhere in the middle of this island, accessible only via this one tiny water route.

Too sleepy to finish this; will continue it tomorrow or the next day.

COCKTAIL
OTC cold/allergy anti-sniffle concoctions chlorpheniramine maleate and clemastine fumarate did a real number on me today. They are still doing a number on me. I am woozy. Profoundly woozy. The word woozy is beginning to seem right on the edge of onomatopoeia, approximating the noise my doped-up brain must make slipping mushily around inside my skull. I characterized my motor reflexes in a sluggishly typed email today as being: discombobulatedly marionettesque. Everything my eyes fall upon seems to be sort of drifting upward. Nothing loud sounds loud.

REMOVED
This works. Am now typing to you from a new room’s corner, sitting folded into a cozy makeshift workstation assembled from disparate furniture components, desk end-table speakers shelves, things propped up on things, gloriously filled back-to-back bookcases standing within reach, a pair of warm low swan-necked lamps peering down at me from atop the closest case. The ceiling leans down a little; the hardwood floor speaks when walked upon. There is no room but I gather I need no room. With the door closed nothing else exists in here, intrudes, dilutes. All there is is me and you and our letters dancing the distance and lack of distance between us. All but ready to acclimate and begin and depart.