It's been boxed up in the basement, along with a few other paintings, safely packaged away until we decide our next move. Maybe a little like a bottle of wine, it's gotten better with age. Or maybe I'm just a little more forgiving of my fair watercolor skills. Either way, I decided not long ago it didn't deserve to be in a box anymore.
It was painted on the banks of an intercoastal waterway in Sunset Beach, North Carolina in the summer of 1993. The only thing I've ever painted 'en plein air' and at the rate I'm going now, will remain the only one. It's a painting of Randy on his flatwater kayak. Directly behind the bank where I was sitting were some friends' homes where some legendary poker games were played. I think all were Concord faculty and friends. And like a little eddy in a river, when I think of Concord, my mind immediately circles to Bea Leist, a beloved faculty member and friend who passed away recently. This painting conjures up many a memory, that all began with a terrible phone call.
The phone call was the third terrible call we received in about a year's time, and the worst of the three. A beloved nephew had taken his life. It was a nightmare, surreal, painful beyond words and still painful to this day. Randy adored this nephew (and his younger brother) and it hit him harder than I knew. I became very worried about him and would find myself calling our house every night from the newsroom, to check on him. And one night, at 10:30 when he didn't answer, I remember racing home because I had a feeling that something wasn't right. He was fine--asleep on the couch. I turned on the 11:00 news to see my co-anchor on the set without me, and the realization we had to do something.
Somehow a kayaking magazine had made its way into our house, and in the back of the magazine was an ad for a flatwater kayak. Randy had seemed interested in it before, and the sport in general, and so I called about it. It was still there. Six hundred dollars and at a kayak store in Brick, New Jersey. We left on a Friday night after the late news, drove all night, and probably seemed like quite a pair when we walked in the store. A young couple from West Virginia, road-weary, have never tried a kayak like this, and no rack on the car to get it home. That's how desperately it was needed.
A flatwater kayak is a tricky boat. His was 17 feet long. I'll never forget that because it wouldn't fit in some of our garages or moving trucks. It was just wide enough for some narrow hips and very, very tippy. The kayak salesman had warned Randy he was going to drink a little water while learning to keep upright. Just the kind of challenge he needed. He took the boat everywhere...to the Bluestone Lake, Glenwood Lake, and the New River. On the weekends I would join him. He on the river, and I along the river banks, looking for arrowheads. I could see him through the trees and at each glance, he would be a little straighter and going a little faster.
Eventually he became pretty good at it and bought a stopwatch. Not long after that, he said he wanted to buy some string. He needed a spool with 200 meters. And I knew that meant he was thinking about trying to race and that gave me hope.
If anyone had seen us at Glenwood Lake, as I held the spool of string on the shore while he paddled out and tried to find a straight stretch that would make about 200 meters, they would have laughed. But it worked well enough. He kept going faster and faster. The main thing is he kept going.
A few months after that we joined the Washington Canoe Club. A pretty grassroots organization of people who played on the Potomac in old boats like ours, and newer ones. We came to know Alexandra and Mike Harbold, who were members and each on the Olympic Kayak Team. As a member of the club (I think it was only $17.00 a month), you had access to the beautiful historic boathouse at the edge of Gorgetown and you could sleep there (on the wood floor) for free. The floor was pretty uncomfortable, so we'd wake up early, but Mike and Alexandra were already up, running or using the rowing machine, because it wasn't light enough out yet to be on the water. Eventually Randy raced in an event not far from the Canoe Club. He did pretty well and continued to practice. We heard of an Olympic tryout in Lake Placid, New York, and we went for it. It was amazing to see the old skeleton of a ski jump in the summertime, arching up above the lush trees as we neared the lake.
I didn't know what to expect at an Olympic tryout, but there wasn't a lot of pomp and circumstance. Mike was there. There was a group of Cuban defectors who looked really fast and plenty of other racers we'd never seen before. Mike finished first and would go on to finish sixth or seventh in the Olympics. Randy finished a respectable race at the tryout and wasn't last. Pretty remarkable for the short time he'd been paddling. On the drive home, we both joked that one day we'd look back on this and be really glad we went for it. I guess these are those days.
We moved from Bluefield, West Virginia to Morgantown and the boat came with us. He paddled on the Monongahela River and when we moved to Salt Lake City, he'd kayak on the Great Salt Lake. He'd come back with a dried layer of salt on the boat and I'd warn him that it might eat right into the boat. It didn't. We moved to Arizona, and the boat was leaned up against the house in the hot desert sun. I warned him the sun would ruin the boat. It didn't. It survived and he survived.
When we decided to come back to the Midwest, it was apparent that our moving truck would soon be out of room and couldn't accommodate a 17-foot long boat that had been sitting due to a shortage of time and water.
He put an ad on Craigslist and surprisingly, within no time, a very excited guy came over and took it away.
No comments:
Post a Comment