Sheridan Lake Sunrise 1995

I was half asleep when I promised my son of twelve that I’d be out of a warm sleeping bag to slip into a cold canoe before sun rise. As we had crawled into the tent that night we had reminisced about the deer and loons we had seen on other camping and waterskiing trips to Sheridan Lake in the Caribou country.

It had been an extraordinarily sulky hot day the summer before when we had decided to circumnavigate a small islet just offshore from our campsite. An idyllic way to spend a cool hour… Pushing an air mattress between us as a resting place, we had dog paddled and played our way up the length of the slender oval shaped islet. When the loons appeared, one, two, three in the open water beyond the island there was no surprise. The ululations of loons were one of the reasons for camping at Sheridan Lake. When we rounded the tip of the island into the open water where we had first spotted the loons, they popped up in the channel we had been swimming in, now behind us. The family, a pair and a young one swam, under and around us, circumnavigating the islet again and again as we swam the length of the island back toward camp.

The next morning when Rory Lee started shaking me to wake me, my half asleep noble intentions came home to roost. I couldn’t believe it was happening. This was the child I could not rouse from bed most days with a dynamite blast. I had thought that I was safe making a dawn appointment with him because if I didn’t wake us, who would? That reasoning had backfired and now I could break the promise or get on with it. Forget the coffee too.

It was not much better once we were in the canoe either. Our roles were still reversed with Rory admonishing me to stop whining and help him paddle. I refused telling him I was cold. When he offered me his shirt, I took it from the kind and now going to be cold young man. Tracing the path of the sun along the edge of the distant mountains we paddled hard toward the spot where the sun is going to come up. We reached our goal as the suns’ spotlight hit the lake.

The sun illuminated the water in front of us; the tip of an islet whose end merged into a thick bulrush mat came into clear view. On a large boulder surrounded on three sides by the rushes, in the middle of the first patch of morning sun on the lake, a family of otters had obviously been poised to also take advantage of those first rays of sun. A couple of pups, sun glinting off the water on their sleek dark brown pelts, were already slipping down the side of the rock to disappear soundlessly into the water. A parental otter sat atop the rock keeping a watchful eye, probably the male. The pups were reappearing in the reeds to slither and swim back to the rock and disappear over the side again. Another adult head, probably the female appeared amongst the kit of five pups in the fishing disguised as play.

Again the canoe had proven it’s ability to open natures’ doors and we were able to glide soundlessly past without disturbing the family. Of course the otters knew that spot. Who but they would have command of the sandy bottom lake, and who but they, and yes, now us, would be able to awaken a day with such joyous play.