Last weekend Myron and I went kayaking on the Baraboo River in Wisconsin, which we’d never heard about before, but found by typing “kayaking” and “Wisconsin” into Google. I highly recommend the Baraboo River Rentals, run by a couple of enthusiastic and interesting college students and their grandparents. At first I couldn’t understand why we were driving all the way from Chicago to Wisconsin for this four-hour kayak trip when we could have gone downtown and rented from that place at the mouth of the Chicago River and Lake Michigan, but when we got on the water and it was so calm and quiet–we didn’t meet another soul for hours–I understood that getting into the stillness can dramatically change the experience of being home in the city.
A couple of things stayed with me. The blue heron that kept flying ahead of us, perching on a rock or tree, and then moving on when we caught up, but it almost seemed as if he was waiting for us, looking out for us somehow. And the driver of the shuttle bus who took us to and from the put-in spot. He was in the midst of a master’s degree in rehabilitation studies, he told us, meaning he was looking into alternative ways to help people with depression and people with PTSD, soldiers and victims of anything from rape, to child abuse, to police brutality, cope in ways that dramatically improved the their lives. It seemed so miraculous that a twenty-two year old would devote his life to something like that–flying ahead, perching on a rock or tree, looking out for us somehow.
