Sleep

It is a sunny summer weekend day in Seattle, one of few that we've seen this year. I know that toy ship drivers will flock to the lakes and that the narrows will end up looking and feeling like the rush hour traffic that they all want to escape. The "crossing under place" will pile up, two and three foot high chop from the wakes echoing off the concrete walls caused by motor boats packed in like fuming sardines.We head to the Sammamish River, starting up high enough that a moving motorboat will be an oddity. The ones that we pass are rotting relics, paint peeling, dusty and sun bleached with tarps covering leaky decks. It is as if their owners have already given up on the boredom of driving slowly down five miles of narrow river to the big lake - the idea and the reality a world apart. After a mile of easy upstream paddling, we pass the point where no motorboat can come. The river turns away from a nearby busy road and it becomes quiet. We repeatedly flush a pair of green backed herons. Once or twice they let out their peculiar mournful call. We do likewise with a few great blue herons, which dwarf the crow-sized green backs.

We don't paddle that far, and we don't paddle that hard, but the day has just sapped our energy and we are not exhausted, but sleepy, eyes heavy, keeping our eyes on the swinging watch of summer.

This all happened on July 24, not the 25th. I was too sleepy to post.