Categories
Dog Bob Top Bob Transcendental Bob Tribute Bob

2010: Ashes to ashes

When Xena died last summer, I didn’t really write about it. I couldn’t. It was one of those rare times when words fluttered away from me like a flock of frenetic finches.

Tonight, as 2010 gasps its last and the Knoxville Years draw to a close, I decided to scatter the big dog’s ashes in Lake Loudon. There were tears. But I also paused to remember what she meant to me. I thought about a time almost 12 years ago to the night, when I looked up from the couch to see a Newf puppy charging at me in wide-eyed terror, a string of twinkle lights wrapped around her hind legs and a 12 foot Christmas tree tumbling behind her. Christmas ended early that year. But it was OK.

I thought about the time 11 years ago when Xena and I drove back from the Knoxville News Sentinel after delivering a batch of pretty awesome black-eyed peas to the staff there. The Mingus Big Band played on the radio as the clock struck 12 and the year 2000 kicked into gear. The world kept turning, despite prophesies of computer-assisted doom. I swear I could see Xena grinning in the rearview mirror.

Maybe that’s why a tear came to my eye when the Mingus Big Band came on tonight while Lara and I drove back form an early New Year’s Eve dinner at RouxBarb, our favorite Knoxville restaurant. I knew it was time to scatter Xena’s ashes. To bring closure to the Knoxville Years.

The lake was fizzing with reflected fireworks. Partying people laughed in the distance. A blue heron squawked through the darkness like a blind man tapping his way across a busy intersection. Gray ashes filtered down from the dock, into the black water and back from whence they came.

Lara and I leave Knoxville fondly. This place has been wonderful to us and we’ll never forget it. I enter 2011 confident that there will be more dogs, more love and more Mingus down the line.

Happy New Year, y’all.

Categories
Assorted Bob Paddle Bob Top Bob Transcendental Bob Uncategorized

Nuns with paddles

Lake Loudon sunriseIt’s so dark I don’t see the nun buoy until I’m a few feet away. How odd. The red, nun-shaped marker on Parks Bend conjures an instant flashback to angry Sister Mary Library chasing me and Doug Hamilton around book shelves with a paddle, hoping to put a hurtin’ on us after we’d glued alarm clocks under all the library tables at St. Anselm High School. The clocks were set to go off at 2 minute intervals. Sister Mary Library turned her wrath toward me and Doug as the library erupted into something akin to the beginning of Pink Floyd’s “Time.” I guess our howls of laughter gave us away.

I paddle past Sister Mary Library, crossing the main channel of Fort Loudon and pointing my bow downstream.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been out before sunrise. Giant fish, veritable leviathans, loll along the surface of the water and slip back into its blackness. I wonder what type of fish they are, rising slowly to greet the day. My nifty new head lamp reflects off the Steeler-gold kayak. I’m hoping it will stop me from becoming a speed bump for bass boats. But this morning, there are very few boats out as the sun starts to chase  blackness to silhouette. A Chris-Craft yacht lumbers down the main channel at idle speed, perhaps heading up to Knoxville to join the Vol Navy for tomorrow’s game. Its wake adds a bit of roll to my forward motion.

I pass a pair of bass fishermen, the first boat I’ve seen since the Chris-Craft.

“How many horsepower is that thing?” the angler asks, shaking his head as I paddle past.

“One. Barely,” I tell him. “I promise I’ll watch my wake.”

We laugh. I continue.

Herons watch warily from their perches on the shore, some brave enough to hold their ground, most lurching skyward in a series of croaks, leaving occasional dimples on water grazed by wings struggling to be airborne. An osprey’s white belly flashes overhead. A kingfisher cackles in the pines lining the shore.

When I reach the osprey nest at the mile 604 daymark, I look longingly at the Loudon Lock and Dam, another mile or two downstream. I’ve wanted to get that far for as long as I’ve been paddling Loudon. But this isn’t the morning to do that. It’s time to turn the kayak. Head back across the main channel to the north shore and make my way back to Duck Cove. That will give me a 12..5-mile dose of morning bliss.

Squinting into the risen sun, I paddle with aching arms.  I think about James Dickey’s “Deliverance,” which I’ve been re-reading and re-watching for reasons that I’m not completely in tune with. I’m not thinking about purty mouths or piggies squealing. I’m thinking about the book’s core themes. The impending harnessing of something wild. A raging river that’s about to be tamed behind a dam, just as this lake was when TVA  impounded it in the 1940s. And how this middle-age kayaker makes his way past lakefront fortress estates where fat suburban Labradors pant from bush to bush, futilely trying to mark the world in fits of canine conquest.

Google Earth/GPS of my route:

Categories
Assorted Bob Books Transcendental Bob

An inverted NPR moment, thanks to Hank Stuever

NPR likes to define its “moments” as those times you sit in your driveway with the car running, waiting for a particularly enthralling story to end before going into your house.

Thanks to Hank Stuever and his marvelous book “Tinsel,” Lara and I had an inverse NPR moment recently. Our friend Barb loaned us an audio copy of Hank’s book, which we spent much of a 16-hour roundtrip drive to Pittsburgh listening to.

As we hit Abingdon, VA, I started wondering if we had enough book left to last the rest of the drive home. When we entered Knoxville, I started worrying that we wouldn’t have enough time to finish it and we’d be sitting in the driveway, waiting for it to end.

But as we pulled in our driveway, the last line of the book was read. It had lasted exactly long enough to get us home. Lara and I looked at each other, grinned and thanked Hank for a delightful drive.

If you haven’t read “Tinsel,” add it to your “must read” list. Wonderful book. Hank’s observational tale is perfect for this examination of Christmas and what it means to us, as seen through the folks in the Dallas exurb of Frisco, Texas. Some of it’s pretty strange, but Hank doesn’t judge. He just observes and lets the people speak for themselves. It’s clear that he developed a true affinity for many of the book’s subjects, and it’s uncanny how the holiday events offer a macroeconomic tale of a society consumed with debt, spending and materialism. But the Christmas spirit is in there, too. Buy a bunch of them and give them as gifts next Christmas.