Back when I was scoping out distressed lake cabins, my friend Ramona was trying to regain her footing. Her husband and my chum, William, had died two years earlier after a bruising battle with COPD. Neither of us had a clue how much the earth would shift when William departed this mortal life.
William was a big-brain Mensa who never made it to college. He spent four decades working at a suburban stove factory. We’ll never really know whether his job, his cigarettes or a mean trick of DNA led to the emphysema and cascading health problems that sucked the breath out of him one February day.
William thought of “life everlasting” in practical terms, not religious ones. He believed that each of us lives on in another’s memories, stories and things left behind.
And so it is with the Loveless canoe.
Out of the blue last summer, Ramona offered to give me William’s canoe – a massive 17-foot Alumacraft, built in 1968. The red paint is scarred after decades of rough-and-rocky river trips William had taken in his healthier days.
Last weekend, Ramona and I paddled the canoe from the boat launch at the southern end of Loveless Lake to my place on the northwestern side. We made light of it, but in reality it was a pretty heavy deal.
William would have loved the irony of his canoe landing on neglected property at a place called Loveless.
Chris says we're taking the canoe to its retirement home, where the waters are calm, the bottom is sandy and the bass plentiful.
Everybody say Amen.
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