Take Me To The River

Today I took myself on another Artist's Date. Since my wonderful Puffing Billy adventure some weeks ago, I have been enjoying conceiving these solo adventures. I have been to the Night Market, where I let myself be caught in the current of a dense sea of people sampling foods of the world, scented candles and buskers. I ate an eggplant and tofu wrap, sipped wine from a plastic tumbler and listened to a reggae band play Leonard Cohen covers. I also found, beneath all those feet, the little green cocktail umbrella that has given me so much energy in the studio.

Last week I saw Art School Confidential at the Rooftop Cinema. A lovely venue but an awful film! It left me feeling much less wholesome than my other excursions. So I was keen to do something more down-to-earth, this week.

I took myself kayaking on the Yarra river.

For someone so thoroughly unsporty as me, it took some courage just to front up at the boathouse. It was quiet at Studley Park, just a few retirees ordering cappuccinos at the kiosk and, on the water, two young women with toddlers in a rowboat, puffy in life vests and going nowhere fast.

I drew a few quizzical glances when I asked to hire a kayak on my own. The boathouse at Studley Park is very much a family and leisure spot. Picnickers having a splash for fun - but I was too scared to front up at a more serious rowing club. 

I entombed my long legs in the nose of the kayak and tried very hard to row in a straight line until I was out of sight of the kiosk. I was all over the shop at first, drifting toward one bank and then the other, trying to look especially interested in the trees and ducks so that any onlooker might think I was doing it on purpose. 

Visions of myself as Pocahontas evaporated pretty quickly. Every stroke deposited a quantity of water on the lap of my black jeans, and the arhythmic clunking of the paddle on the fibreglass body of my craft announced my ineptitude to anyone who happened to be passing.

The nice thing was, there was no sign of anyone.

I shook off my mild humiliation and realised I was quite alone, in the middle of the river, with nothing behind or ahead but water and bushland (though an occasional 'thwack!' to my left betrayed a golfcourse behind the trees). I put my raincoat over my already drenched legs and paddled forth, improvising different paddling techniques. By and by, two blokes in a little motorboat chugged slowly by. They looked like rangers or park staff, inspecting the banks, but it occurred to me they might also be checking up on the weirdo zig-zagging solo up the Yarra with no apparent reason or experience.

When they were gone, all was silent again, except for the busy chatter of the birds. Ducks stared me down from the muddy banks, and I spied a pair of red-rumped parrots above me in a bare tree, huddled together with vivid yellow bellies.

I had hired the kayak for an hour (a decision I queried after the first fifteen tiring minutes) and so my destination was a point on my watch-face, not on the map. I was impressed by how far I seemed to have come in half an hour - to a part of the river I hadn't seen before. Just as I was about to turn back, I noticed a sign on the left bank (to which I was headed on purpose, of course). I read it, for the sake of appearances, and found that it said: 

FLYING FOXES: 

You are approaching a very large colony of flying foxes. 

Do not be alarmed, they will not harm you...

I looked upstream. To my astonishment and delight, I found every tree on the landscape before me decorated with sleeping bats. I cried out in surprise. There were hundreds of them. I have never seen anything like it! I paddled closer and looked up at them: marvellous, strange fruit, shrink-wrapped in leathery wings.

Now and again, one of the motionless number would suddenly extend a wing or two for a stretch, before re-wrapping itself and continuing its slumber. Two woke completely and flapped a slow whoomph-whoomph above me, their iconic wings spanning a dark metre.

I was captivated.

Reluctantly, and now running late, I paddled in an arc and headed back, with a surer stroke, slipping fast downstream, Pocahontas in sodden jeans.