Ron, Author at Pocomoke River Canoe Company

Reflections on the Pocomoke

On a perfect morning, when the Pocomoke is flat calm and the sun is angled toward the water, surrounded by white clouds and blue sky, you could take a photo and not know when it was upside down or right side up. That’s how clear, how sharply lined the reflections are. If a blue heron flies over and you looked down into the tea-colored water, you would see the grayish underside of its wings as sharply as if you were lying on your back and looking up.

Saturday morning was such a morning.

From my kayak, I thought about how magical it would be to paddle into those reflections, to see the cypress and the clouds shining in the water all around my boat. Almost as if I were paddling in the upper story of a deep forest. The trees glimmered in the water in front of me, and I paddled cautiously toward the shoreline, for all it would take would be one cypress knee, just beneath the surface, to punch a hole in my skin boat.
It’s impossible to do! I’m probably revealing my abysmal lack of physics (or would it be optics? Or meteorology?) but the reflection recedes as fast as you paddle toward it. The top of the reflected treeline remained precisely the same distance away from the bow of my kayak as I approached the riverbank. By the time I got to the edge it had disappeared into the forest, like a deer that had come to drink and looked up to see me. The mirrored forest fled my kayak just the same as a turtle dropping off a log.

I tried sneaking up, angling the boat into the incoming tide and sliding obliquely into the reflection. I tried paddling from the upstream and downstream sides, but still the watery forest detected my approach and headed for the shoreline.

The bow of my boat boasts an Inuit symbol, perhaps the Indian root of the common theatrical grin/scowl, a smiling face carved into one side of a round cherry disc, the other a black glower. It’s like the maidenhead on a frigate. My friend and carver Doug Fisher presented it to me when I was nearing completion of the boat. As I pulled my kayak back onto the floating dock I couldn’t help but see that smirk, mocking me. “You idiot,” it said wordlessly. “You should have paid more attention in school.”

The River is Good for Your Mental Health

No more than half-a-mile from the canoe shop there’s a tiny “lagoon,” on the town side of the Pocomoke. This summer it is lined with honeysuckle, hundreds of blooms so low to my deck that at high tide some are beneath the tea-colored water. It has become one of my favorite morning spots.
I’m in the habit of paddling that way several mornings a week, not long after dawn, and floating quietly surrounded by the flowers. The drone of traffic on Route 113 finds a way through the cypress, but as I tell everyone who asks me about how to choose a kayak, everything that has to do with small boats is a compromise. Length vs. maneuverability vs. speed. Cost vs. durability. I can paddle another hour north and the traffic din will disappear, but the schedule intrudes. Silence vs. the clock.
In my kayak I can sit cross-legged in the shade, and for half an hour or so, by concentrating on my breathing, I can nearly wipe from my senses anything that isn’t natural. On a paddleboard, like this morning, I have to lie on my back. With my hands crossed on my chest, unmoving except the rise and fall as I breathe, from a distance I must look like a corpse. No one has ever paddled or motored over to check on me.
There is an amazing symbiosis between the practice, meditative breathing, and the natural world. The sum of the two far exceeds its parts. I can do the same at home, sitting on the carpet in the air conditioning, but I cannot hear the seagulls overhead nor can I feel the aroma of the honeysuckle as I breathe in – and it is, believe me, a palpable feeling. I cannot feel the motion of the boat under me; even with your eyes closed you can feel your boat drift. The contact points, knees against the underside of the kayak deck, shoulder blades against the hard plastic paddleboard deck, sharpens my perception of every other incoming sense more than my sit bones on the plush carpet do.
The quiet meditation enriches the absorption of the surrounding nature. Absorption is the correct noun. A walk in the woods does much the same, but without the gentle rolling of the boat and the darkness of eyelids closed much of the rest of the experience is lost, undetected. Paddling my kayak without stopping is a great way to become a part of my surroundings, but without the corpse-like stillness and the concentrated aromas, much of that experience flies by as the bow parts the water.
Green is good for your mental health.

Early Sunday Morning

Sunday mornings are the best time to be on the Pocomoke if it’s solitude you’re seeking. Traffic noise is a minimum, barely audible in some cuts and lagoons very close to town. Even the turtles sleep in on Sundays. For me, the Pocomoke River is a hallowed sanctuary, near the buzzard roost cypress where the river is wide and cathedral-like, and in the shallow, sheltered shoreline dip where someone has a fish trap set, where it’s more like a chapel.

I left the dock on a paddleboard shortly after 6. I was on a board I had never used, but will likely become mine if its owner buys himself a new board and I follow through on the promise I made to buy his old one so that he could more easily make a case at home for the $2000 SUP. It’s much lighter than the Old Town boards I typically paddle, and of different material, fiberglass-sheathed foam. The first thing I noticed as I paddled north into a series of tiny riffles on the river, was that as they struck the bow they made a noise like shaking sand in a Mason jar.

It took some time to accustom myself to the feel of the long glass platform under my feet. In sailing parlance, it’s more tender than anything else I’ve paddled while upright, but I found that I could easily affect the direction as I headed upstream by shifting my weight (slightly – I’m not that good at it). So I had to swing the paddle from port to starboard less often.

About half-a-mile from the dock I heard the bell ring for the drawbridge and knew that within a minute or two a bass boat would be flying up the river to whatever spot its occupants held sacred. So I was prepared. As the boat approached, it swung wide but failed to slow, and put out a wake whose whitecaps melted into the river before they got to me but left residual rollers. I turned the board into the waves and continued to stroke.

The angle of the sun was such that I was facing a corduroy-like procession of sun-shadow, sun-shadow, sun-shadow rolling toward me. Watching the light on the water change was strangely the same feeling of disequilibrium as trying to walk a straight line after too many gin and tonics. I managed to stay vertical, but had to cease paddling until everything passed under the board.

Just as I was sweeping on the left to return to Snow Hill a small bird flew from a cypress knee to the shoreline. It looked like a bittern upon landing, but was probably a little green heron. They’re not rare, but in a good year I might only spot one half-a-dozen times. I knew that the highlight of the day had, in that few seconds before the bird hopped out of sight, come and gone. But it was worth it.

-Ron Pilling