9 Ways of Looking at a Paddleboard

1. There it is: eleven and a half feet of dual-layered military-grade PVC, teal + white + gray, finned, foam-topped, and foldable, spangled with D-rings and cargo netting, filled with nothing but air, floating they say through physics but you think it’s mostly through will. 

2. The first ride is a revelation. Helping hands hold the board still, the easier for you to stand, but this is a mistake—the board wants to move. If you want to ride the board (and you do), you too must move (and you do). In the first moment, everything is strange, fluid, unpredictable, a vast and incomprehensible mystery; in the next, you are born anew, standing on water. This is buoyancy gravity density surface tension love.

This is the world, now.

3. What compares? Remember the mechanical bull: it moves beneath you. You bend/float/adapt/ride above it.  You don’t control it; it doesn’t control you. You are one unit. 1+1=1.  

4. The inaccessible becomes accessible. The impossible becomes possible. The unknowable becomes known. In minutes, you have breached the line of swim buoys. In an hour, who knows where you might be? Bermuda/Tortuga/Atlantis, the horizon a plaything in your pocket. You pass through seagrass and coral formations, lobster and jellyfish. Purple-spined sea urchins blend into rocks morph into shells, all of them glittered with sand that pulses, like the electric wave of your heart. How far to the bottom? Four feet? Ten? A lifetime? Who can tell? The water is so clear it’s like flying; it swells, testing your balance just just just enough to make you know you are here by skill, luck, and destiny. You’re a pirate of wonder as tarpon longer than you are tall shoot by/beneath in silver-sparked glory, and you remember deep in your belly (terror and delight) that you’re a stranger in a strange, strange world. But you are also a sea shanty, a round in four parts, an alleluia amen, sparks of light refracting through water, uncontrolled and uncontrollable.  

You are lightning. 

Eventually, you turn back. Not because you want to.

5. “If a man is to be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most.” – E. B. White

6. Your borrowed board has gone home, and so have you. But you want more. 

One miracle is never enough.

You do the math. You ponder. One day you decide: this is what an inheritance is for. It should transform a life. It should make the impossible possible. It should make the inaccessible accessible.  

You discard the math. (what are numbers? imagination. smoke. air)  

You pay your tuition; you build the chicken coop; you buy the paddleboard.

7. Liquid surrounds you. Rain draws a line from above to below, gray cloud to green water. You slip sideways down the wave faces, your legs shifting to accommodate the tilt. Are you wet from the spray or from the rain? Does it matter? You wear the mist; it is cold and lovely. There is nowhere to go and anywhere, everywhere, to be—you and a paddle and a board and the sea.  

The shore fades away behind you. You don’t miss it.

You laugh, water droplets like pearls studding your hair, and keep paddling into something you can’t name.

8. “Ships are the nearest things to dreams that hands have ever made.” – Robert N. Rose

9. There it is: eleven and a half feet of wonder, dual-layered military-grade joy and possibility, yes + no + maybe all at once, spangled with destinations, filled with nothing but all the things you could be. You walk on water now.  

Amanda Seney, like Mulder, wants to believe. She lives and writes in the Great Lakes region, surrounded by family, water, and chickens.  Her work is forthcoming in Belt Magazine.

A Song for Amanda