Change of Plans

There should be a lake here.  I can imagine it as I gaze upwards.  I'm floating down a tiny creek in a kayak,  fly rod in my lap, August air thick with fog and the smell of bass.   Huge riverbank poplars and white-barked sycamores drape the creek above me like a roof, but in my mind I replace their sheltering mass with 100 feet of water instead.  Catfish and carp should be swimming there, between me and the surface of the reservoir, far above, their dark green shapes outlined against the sky, shimmering and refracting a world that does not exist.  They should live there.  Instead, I float downstream in a 10-foot kayak, fishing instead of training for the SM100.  I'm just floating along, in a Pandemic and barely a foot of water, and I contemplate the nature of plans that change.  

The days are getting shorter.  Every year for the last dozen years or so, the changing of the season from Summer to Fall has brought about a sort of restlessness in me.  I should be on my bike.  I need the miles.   On The Sunday Before Labor Day any other year, I would race the SM100.  It's difficult, but necessary.  It's the only way I know to allow summer to peacefully bow out, become fall.  

I have finished the SM100 10 times.  But I won't this year.  My brain knows and understands that.  Racing bikes is far, far down the list of things that we have to sort out how to do again in this world.  But the slow twitch fibers in my calves and certain buried aspects of my nervous system have so far been reluctant to come around.   I've been waking up at night.  The air has been cool in the mornings this week, and the leaves are turning dry now.  

Like water, there is simply no other way forward.  Floating a river teaches you that.  I give a couple of easy strokes with the paddle, make a cast again, and I try to center myself in the kayak, here at the bottom of a lake that almost happened.  It's a strange thing to ponder , an entire ecosystem - fish, turtles, people, races, lives, simply dropped from the narrative.