Wild fires miles away were devouring the west while we paddleboarded into the wind, charging the northwest summer sun still high in the late afternoon sky. The bay was steeped in haze. My long curls flapped plenty behind my bare shoulders, and I admired the contours of your naked back as you pushed further ahead. The air stream pressed against us, as we had once pressed against each other, and surged across the water already roughed in glinted waves buzzing in the glow of hot sun that was through the thick air wholly visible. Remember this, I thought. Right now. Remember this.
*
A north wind tested our stability with a thrilling jolt that zapped nerves like static to skin. I stretched my arms for balance. You too felt this shiver in your bones. I saw it in the hollow of your open mouth when you turned your dark eyes to me laughing. Your body still cut by the long climbs of youth, you’d grown soft in other ways—nostalgic with the weight of 20 years that piled up since we last idled an entire day on water.
*
Neither of us considered why we smelled no smoke. When we changed direction and hoisted our paddles like sails, our speed was suddenly an accelerated rush that warped distance and streaked the landscape with time, stretching the pine forest shoreline into a continuous blur of green closing in on the horizon— a velocity like falling or falling in love or dying. Was this it? you seemed to say, dipping your paddle and steering closer. Was this what we worked for? Our boards sucked and slapped the surface now darkened by our own shadows stretched long before us. If we ever made it home, we’d have to acknowledge the matter of this smokeless strange air.
Tina Mitchell is the editor of The Turnip Truck(s), managing editor of im-possible, and co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Kept Secret: The Half Truth in Nonfiction (Michigan State University Press, 2017). She received her MFA from University of Idaho and PhD from University of Louisiana, Lafayette.