When you aren't sure where she is, it helps to know your own location. The water was coke bottle green and visibility just beyond the tips of my fingers. I could clearly see clear bubbles of turbulence off my hands as I stroked through the water. Catching a breath, there was the blue sky and an intricate pattern of snowy clouds. Studying the pattern, I could orient myself with each stroke and keep the rhythm of arms and the forward momentum. Still I stopped regularly to sight on the island, to find Elizabeth's bare back in front of me and Pat's bobbing head behind.
Our destination was a pinnacle of rocks. Distant from the Lake Buchanan shore, there was no scale to provide any sense of how far. Perhaps if we had had more sense we wouldn't have set out. But "We can always turn back" was my optimistic assessment. I, who have made a hundred crossings, should have remembered how disorienting it can be in the middle, without a clear sense of how far there is to go in either direction. When, finally, I asked Pat if she thought we should turn back, Elizabeth was well ahead, and the island seemed tantalizingly close. But it was still a long pull before we finally pulled ourselves onto a bikini-bottom sized granite sand beach.
There is magic in an island. Even though you could throw a stone into the water in any direction, there is the mystery of water moving through the cracks, granite stone crumbling in your hands. On this particular island also the artifacts of earlier visitors and a peak into the minds of people I will never know.
