Mickey’s
Meanderings
Gift Of A Song
I had already taken 12 people
kayaking for two hours on a warm and sunny Saturday. Now, I sat in the shade
with a bottle of water, waiting for the second group of people to arrive. I
reapplied sunscreen and bug spray and adjusted my sweaty visor. I considered
changing my shirt, but it had already dried. No worries, I told myself. Nobody
will notice.
As much as I love kayaking and being
around the water, I really just wanted to go home, unpeel my sweaty clothes and
make a nice dinner. This was my sixth straight work day and I was starting to
feel it. “Don’t complain if you have work,” I told myself. And “never, ever,
ever complain when you get to do something you enjoy.”
This particular afternoon kayak trip
was a special charter trip with 12 musicians. The musicians are visiting here
in New Smyrna Beach, Fla., in a special program at the Atlantic Center for the
Arts. They came here from around the world to study for two weeks with top
mentor musicians and to perform concerts both here and in Orlando.
So as I sat there waiting for the
musicians to arrive, I wondered how this kayak eco-tour would go. How many of
them could speak English? How should I adapt the tour for people who speak
English as a second language? What would they understand about the Indian River
Lagoon? What was important for them to understand? And how much should we focus
merely on paddling and the experience of being in the water – away from cellos
and percussion – and in an environment that most of them had never experienced.
I advised my kayak assistant that
this group likely would not be athletic, so we would take a much slower pace on
the paddling route. I also surmised that we would probably need more
small-sized life jackets, since these musicians would not be Americans who
typically need the larger sizes. (Sorry, but this is true!)
A big white van pulled up and an
eclectic group of young men and women jumped out of the van, excited about this
new adventure. They walked over to me with giant smiles on their faces and a
readiness that gave me the kick in the pants that I needed. They were here from
Poland, Egypt, Lebanon, South Korea, Beijing, China, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal,
England, Venezuela and India.
I signed them in, fitted each with a
life jacket and gave each paddler a whistle to use for emergencies. They were
thrilled to receive the whistles and soon sounded like a creative chorus of
crickets, finding ways to make sounds with the whistles that had never occurred
to me.
As we prepared to head to the kayaks,
I watched the young man from India carefully tie his hair into a topknot. I
counseled the young woman from London about the safest way to bring along her rather
large camera. And then I locked all of their arts center room keys into a
waterproof box and the parade to the water began.
As suspected, these folks were not
especially physically gifted, but their spirits were willing. I loaded the man
from Cairo into a kayak and he leaned frighteningly to the left and to the
right. I felt, for sure, I would soon be in the water helping him back into his
boat. Even though he paddled in a zigzag fashion, running into mangrove trees
that snagged his beard, and T-boning my boat from the side at least three
times, his joy was apparent. He paddled fast, as if he were on a mission, and
when I suggested that he might have a little more control if he could slow down
his boat, he just laughed and said, “I don’t know how to stop.”
One very tall young man from Senegal
plied carefully through the water with his dark skin glowing in the sun. The fair-skinned
young man from Poland had a perpetual smile on his face from start to finish. Two
young women from Beijing and Seoul shared a tandem kayak and squealed with
delight as fish leaped from the water around their boat.
I kept the narrative simple. For
example, rather than explaining the virtues of mangrove trees, I simply told
them they are tropical trees that grow around the world. And then I asked how
many of them had mangrove trees in their countries. Several hands shot up. The
young man from India added that there are estuaries in his homeland, but said
they were not allowed to paddle there. “Why not?” we asked. “Because of
tigers,” he answered.
I took this group of paddlers to a
sandbar in the middle of the lagoon. It was low tide and we were able to wade
on the sandbar. Some got out and rolled around in the warm salt water. The
African men began singing a song about walking on water. The British woman
gathered the group and photographed them standing together, colorful kayaks
providing a backdrop for their radiant faces.
I showed the paddlers some clams and
where they lived on the sandbar. One clam was dead, leaving behind its two
large shells. The paddler from Egypt asked if he could have the shells and
seemed pleased with his prize from the lagoon.
We paddled on. As I spotted birds, I
would identify what they were. I could hear the paddlers repeating the words in
their respective boats around me. Ibis.
Egret. Osprey. Great blue heron.
Soon, it was time to paddle back to
shore. The musicians were tired, but they were still excited and determined.
The Egyptian led the way, still speeding in a leaning zigzag, followed by a
musician from Kenya and a bright yellow tandem with a Venezuelan string player
and a young woman from Lebanon. The group pulled into shore and took more
photos together.
And then, as if it were as normal as
breathing air, the paddlers drifted into a circle on the sand and began making
rhythmic music out of their whistles and water bottles. I looked over and the
paddler from Egypt was leading the song with a sophisticated, syncopated
downbeat by cupping his clam shells. That out-of-control paddler was a
percussionist extraordinaire, albeit with mollusks in his hands and sand in his
toes.
Their song filled the air with its
impromptu delight and the musicians fed off each other. Their feet moved in the
sand and their faces reflected the music that lives within each of them. They
were black, white, Asian, Muslim, Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist, Protestant.
And they were 12 people from around
the world who came to the water for a simple Saturday afternoon activity. Maybe
they did not notice that they absolutely left their kayak leader gobsmacked and
amazed with the simple beauty of their heartfelt song. They probably did not
see the goose bumps on her arms as their song swelled in the late afternoon sun.
Even as they climbed back into their
van and waved goodbye, I could hear the whistles and water bottles exploring
new notes. I’m sure it was a concert inside that van all the way back to the
arts center because it was a simple symphony today among the mangroves of the
Indian River Lagoon.
- Lisa D. Mickey, Sept. 15,
2012
