The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

I 've been depressed on and off for the past week or so. Blame it on the stir-crazies, a lack of social exposure, or the fact that I haven't taken ad- vantage of all this great sun we've been getting, but I've been feeling down lately.

It reached a fever pitch on Sunday. Don't ask me why, don't ask me how. But it was bad, folks. Real bad.

I had a bad feeling about the trip we were taking Sun- day afternoon - to Bennington Lake in order to use our newly-purchased kayaks. Besides the fact that I would need to spend an hour's round trip stuck in the car with my frazzled, testy im- mediate family, I would be attempting an unfamiliar ac- tivity in an unfamiliar place, which sounded like a recipe for disaster.

Upon arrival, we backed our car down to the launch ramp, and I surveyed the lake. It was a modest ex- panse of water the color of chocolate milk. Grass and trees grew right up to the wa- ter's edge. On either end, the lake tapered off and snaked out of sight.

We unloaded the kayaks, plunked them in the water, and paddled off. The kayaks are all identical - blue, eight feet long, and flat-topped. I had never paddled a flat- topped kayak before. My boat - the only thing separating me from twenty feet of murky water - was basically a slab of plastic with ridges on the top. There was a plastic seat held up by an adjustable nylon strap, a divot that served as a cup holder, notches towards the end to prop my heels against, and a three-inch rim.

But once I got the hang of paddling, I felt more comfortable with the kayak. It was rock-solid - if I slid to one side, it would still stay firmly right-side-up. As I started out across the lake, water glugged in and out of the drainage holes, making a curious sort of blurping rhythm to my paddle strokes.

Then I started paddling harder, moving faster. The blurps turned to splashes as I jerked the paddle with all my might. My loneliness, my frustration, my general case of the grumpies - I took it all out on the surface of the lake, tearing it up, shoving it aside. Somehow, it made me feel better.

Eventually, I regrouped with my mother and brother and the three of us started down one of the narrow por- tions of the lake. Passing a sandbar of sorts and a couple of fishermen, we arrived at a shallow channel lined with trees.

There was an eerie unspo- ken understanding among us that this was a place to kayak quietly, to take slow strokes and let the water drip daintily off your paddle.

I spotted a couple of deer near the shore and stopped paddling. They didn't seem alarmed by my presence. Rather, they slowly turned around and retreated into the forest.

We followed the chan- nel as far as it would take us. Eventually, it dried up to rocks and we turned back. As we did so, Mom spotted a small animal swimming in the water. I recognized it as a mole and realized that it was probably drowning. The three of us eventually man- aged to hoist it onto the shore with our paddles.

After that, we beached our kayaks on a small strip of mud. My brother and I started horsing around in the water, fighting for possession of a floating cushion. He dumped water on my head. I lobbed clumps of aquatic weeds at him. We splashed around in the warm water, laughing all the while.

And that's when it hit me - I wasn't depressed anymore.