Sometimes I wonder how much more I’d get done if I didn’t live on the water. Forty feet of it, to be precise. But I resist counting words. Living on a raft five minutes north of downtown goes beyond productivity.
It’s a mobile home, really. A two-room houseboat so torqued by wind and wakes that not a true ninety-degree angle has survived, it retains its essential shackiness, woodstove and all. The upscale term for it is “floating home,” a Better Homes and Gardens designation that would have had the logger who threw it together a hundred years back derisively snorting his beer into the lake. Commonly, it’s known as unreal estate. I think the logger would break out another beer for that.
I spend a lot of time sitting at my desk and gazing out the window. Not at anything in particular, just the water, always in motion. Like thought, like words. Glinting silver and black and that steely gray that romantics call blue, it changes shape at the slightest excuse, gathering into cats’ paws, riffles, waves, even whitecaps on a stormy day.
Some feel insecure here, unrooted. All this fluidity makes them nervous. To me, it’s essential. After twenty-odd years on the raft, I get restless on land, miss the awareness of water never being in the same place twice. The world seems oddly silent without the thrum of rain on the surface, the flurry of ducks landing, the roar of a floatplane on takeoff. And less welcoming if I can’t dive in on a hot summer day or float in dark silkiness on a calm moonless night. Work, play, and life all swirl together here, all in motion. Like words.