Kayak story

“I just jumped from a rock!” he shouts as our kayaks float past each other.  His father has the oars, no – probably his uncle, I think. A father would be more cautious. Our boats are nearly touching. They are so close that I can see the purple excitement in the boy’s cheeks.

“I know!” I say in the way you talk to children without meaning to. Animated. Loud.  “I watched you.”

“You did?”  He leans forward so far into the side of the kayak I think for sure he’s going in.  Then he twists himself practically in half toward the uncle.  “She saw me!”

Across the lake a few minutes before. About fifteen boys, lanky, shirtless, huddled near the peak of a magnificent rock ledge twenty feet above the lake. The air was deep – Alabama deep. But the waters were cool, especially at the part they were jumping into.

I had dragged my oar to slow my kayak, fixed on the sudden drama. The other boys knew how to jump (feet first) and where (this dark part here).

“I’ve seen a thousand jump from there,” this same uncle had shouted from below, dog paddling in the water.

One at a time they sailed off the ledge like sea lions.  The boy hesitated, weighing his options: certain death or those other boys making him pay the rest of his life.

He jumped exactly into the center of the dark water.  Whump. He bobbed up a man.

             “Tell her how old you are,” the uncle laughs as they make their way back to the cabin where they will surely tell everyone.

The boy’s mother will smile, then cast a sidelong look at her brother or cousin. “I’ll get you for this.”  But she knows what this will mean to her son for the rest of his life. This is that one week every year when family events get etched into the collective memory. These stories are told for all the years to come.

 The men will cheer loudly.  Grandma will shake her head. “Hmm Hmm Hmm,” she’ll say in that three-syllable hum southern ladies make just before they say something snappy. “Didn’t I tell you that’s where they was going?” or “Liked to break your neck”.

But the boy man will hear only the adulation and feel the stinging slaps on his sunburned shoulders.

“I’m eight!” he shouts, floating toward shore.