August 19, 2025

Local woman enters cardboard boat race

You may have to stagger through the cramped intersections of polite 
conversation, explain to anyone passing by who inquires why 
you are building a boat made of cardboard. Some may want to foist 
their nautical scholarship onto your shoulders, or poke holes 
in your slapdash engineering practices, or wonder how it is you are missing 
a perfectly good weekend by devoting yourself to a project best left 
for summer campers 40 years your junior. They may look at the strange
geometric shapes you’re duct-taping on the front lawn, your plein-air 
workshop floor sawdusted with corrugated fragments, your arms splattered
by the leftovers in the paint cans from last winter’s kitchen renovation, 
and keep walking, returning to their homes and their spouses and lives
unmoved by your rigorous and attentive efforts. And possibly, 
on their next round of dog walks, they may avoid the side of the road 
where you are still, in plainest view, making your work known. 

Later, you will have your proof. Someone will capture on video 
the results of the town’s wildly popular annual race where, despite 
your dearth of expertise and a too-short paddle, you will take top place 
in the first heat of entrants, surpassing the impressive replica from Jaws, 
a squat pontoon embellished aggressively with stripes, and a robust canoe
piloted by two amply proportioned men. You will blow past, too, 
your own minor concerns that your small vessel, even in its earnest 
assembly, would sink. A friend watching from shore will train 
his phone camera on your zigzagged path toward the far buoy, 
then follow you back as the waves whip you toward the finish, will capture 
the moment you realize you have left your competitors well behind you 
and raise your fists skyward. 

See, it can be like this. You can be right—exactly right—
about your roughshod estimates, your feral improvising, swinging from
your unpenned imagination in coltish glee, ripping the tape with your teeth.
It’s not luck that keeps the water out, but your fierce love of any edge 
beyond your knowing. See the unfolding body of the sea creature 
you fashioned out of a septet of boxes, as if mothering its very wildness.
You have earned your place among the canon of those who have crushed
the wrestling match over logic, outlasted the chorus of pragmatists 
who keep pointing, almost fiendishly, toward the questionable metrics 
of every scrappy construction. 

Friend, rest in the glorious irony of having failed this test of humility.
Breathe in the riotous applause that greets you at the return. Hear the echo
of it now, as your heart reaches toward its next naked yearning.
Remember how the wind came through on that last push of the oars,
sticky with freedom.