A slow crossing

The boat is older than I am. You can feel it in the wood, the way the boards have been pressed flat by a hundred summers of feet, the way the iron at the bow has gone soft with rain. It belongs to no one in particular. We rented it for an hour at a small wooden shed at the end of the lake.

The water is the color the postcards promise, which felt suspicious until I saw it. Glacial silt, somebody told me later, suspended in the meltwater. Light bends through it differently. It looks lit from below.

We stopped rowing about ten minutes in. The mountains do most of the talking here, and you don't want to argue with them. A few other boats moved slowly along the far shore, small wooden shapes against the green, as old and unbothered as ours.

I think about this place sometimes when I'm at home, washing dishes or answering email. Not the picture of it, the feeling. That you could stop rowing. That the lake would hold you. That there are still corners of the world that ask only to be sat with.