Paddling on a glassy lake, the paddle makes a sucking sound when as I lift it out of the water. It creates a swirl that resembles a volute, the top of an Ionic column outside a Greek temple. The drops fall of the edge as if they were a denser liquid, a clear syrup maybe. Looking up, to where the lake meets the shore, the reflection of the trees in the water is close to perfect. It takes a few seconds for a ripple, or a bubble rising from the deep, to cause a shiver to pass across the mirror image. Sometimes, there is a splash, and redirecting my eyes to the direction to the sound comes from, I see the concentric waves where a fish must just have leaped out of the water to catch a fly. As a hardly noticeable breeze starts to ripple the surface, the image breaks up. If the angle is right, the sun gets reflected on every wavelet. At other times, the wavelets are either dark blue or dark green, their motion both regular and random. It’s mesmerizing, yet there’s a part of my brain that tries to figure out if a few lines of code couldn’t reproduce the same effect on a computer screen. They probably could, but it’d be the visual effect only. Looking at it wouldn’t be anything like actually being here, on the lake.
Read mre on my recent paddling trip here.
