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Sunday, February 9, 2025
HomeSurvivingHow the Cracks Heal

How the Cracks Heal

Over the years, my husband and I have perfected the difficult ballet of getting out on the water with our kayaks. We pull the car up as close to the boat ramp as we can, then jump out to untie the straps. Michael grabs the bow of one kayak from the roof rack; I get the stern. We lift the boat and walk it to the ground behind the car. Repeat with the second one. We unload and set up gear: paddles, life jackets, water bottles. I stand between the bows and grasp each boat’s front handle loop; Michael holds the back loops. This way we can carry both boats at once down the launch ramp to the water, looking something like a reverse outrigger canoe, a boat suspended on each side of us. 

I wade in until the boats are half on land, half floating in the water, then let go. Michael steadies my boat on the dry end, holding it level so I can straddle the cockpit, sit, and corkscrew my legs in, wedging against the thigh braces, my feet deep in the bow pressed against the foot braces. He gives my boat a push, then gets in his own. 

Getting in my boat is harder and harder each year. But once tucked in, I feel great. Floating at water level, the hull is an extension of me. When I pick up my paddle, dip it in the water from side to side, and glide forward, I become a person who moves easily in the world.

When I was thirty-seven, almost thirty years ago, I was hit by a car while walking home from work. My lower left leg was smashed; reduced to a skin bag of bone fragments. A crack at the top of my right leg—the “good” leg–made it painful to rest any weight on that side, so even using a walker was excruciating. My brain, encased inside the part of me that hit the road first, was concussed. It became unreliable—reading was difficult, my thoughts displaced—word retrieval and concentration as finely cracked as my right tibia, almost invisible, but painful to use. Bones displaced, thoughts displaced; my life quietly shattered, lightning bolt tremors scratched across the plane of that year, mimicking the cracks in my bones the X-rays showed.

Slowly the bones healed, new calcium growing across the gap that had been held together by screws and a bolt of titanium hammered down the length of my leg, metaling the marrow into something stable, something like living tissue.

I spent a year relearning how to walk—first with a walker, then crutches, then a cane. Eventually a couple more minor surgeries—removing the rod and screws, cleaning up the mess in my knees twice. There’s a permanent lump in the bone of my leg, and I don’t have the concentration I used to, but walking will always feel like a gift to me. I never take mobility for granted.

Out on the open water, I dip my paddle from side to side. We head around a bend, under a narrow, low bridge, through a twisting stretch of marinas and private docks, then out into the main basin of Cape May Harbor, home to the national Coast Guard training center, a fleet of commercial fishing vessels, a yacht club, and hundreds of pleasure boats. The water rocks with the crossing wakes, pushing my boat in different directions, sometimes sloshing a wave over the bow into my lap. I do the work of balancing and leaning, pulling deeply from shoulders and torso, movements that after twenty years have become muscle memory. 

Several years after I recovered from the accident, I discovered kayaking while on vacation at the Jersey Shore. The first time my family rented boats, we bobbed on the back bay waters like a bunch of confused ducklings, as we figured out paddling and steering and not tipping over. 

I was smitten. A year later, my husband and I bought our own kayaks, not the sit-on-tops commonly used for summer fun, but more serious narrow touring boats, made to be usable for three seasons, designed to be fairly fast and responsive and stay on track through tides and currents, with small cockpits that hugged the paddler closely, and mostly kept out the water.

Today, we’re the smallest crafts on this stretch of water. We paddle near Coast Guard cutters, whale watching boats full of tourists instructed by the tour guide to “wave at the kayakers,” party boats full of optimistic fishing folk, huge private yachts that look like something from “Below Deck,” scallop-fishing vessels already letting down the netted booms on their sides to begin scraping the sea floor as they head out of the harbor to the Atlantic Ocean scallop beds.

At the dock of a floating bar, five cigarette boats, temporarily still, are tied together—a flat, colorful testosterone island. Their drivers, all young men, lounge on the hulls, drinking beer and playing loud country music. Hobie Cats, Carolina skiffs, Sunfish are closer to our size, but still bigger, and faster. Even paddling our kayaks with the wind and the tide, which never seem to line up in our favor at the same time, we are the slowest boats on the water.

I wasn’t much of an athlete growing up. Running always gave me a stitch in my side. I was pretty bad at catching balls and I threw, sadly, “like a girl”—I still don’t get how overhand throwing works, though I love watching baseball and I brought up a softball-playing daughter. I know this was a failure of education, not of gender. Still, it feels like a loss, even now. 

What I could do was walk. Walking suited my introverted, book-reading personality. I lived in a rural suburb with farms and forests all around our neighborhood. Plenty of places to get lost. And I did, happily.

At the same time, I was also always “overweight,” or at least I thought I was. It turns out that the expectations of the sixties and seventies were ridiculous, and I was healthy by any sane definition. But at any rate, I was never “thin.” 

Two kids later, the not-thin was winning. I got a bike in my early thirties. Anything that you can just keep doing, if you plug at it, is the kind of exercise I can do. I could bike fifteen, twenty miles at a time. I felt like an “athlete” for the first time in my life.

 Getting back on my bicycle a year after the accident was a triumph. I started to feel like a person who moves easily again.  And then, like a person who could figure out how to load and unload boats from the top of a van, carry them to the water, float at water level, my legs lower than the surface, my torso and arms and head above, like a swimming shore bird. A duck or cormorant. Falling in love with a new kind of movement. In some ways, kayaking feels like the watery equivalent to biking. Just keep pedaling. Just keep paddling. You’ll get there, eventually.

We’ve hauled our kayaks all over New Jersey, gliding through the Hackensack Meadowlands past recovering brownfields and industrial wastelands and under the New Jersey Turnpike. We’ve skimmed waters of the Raritan Bay, the Passaic River, the Navesink River, Matawan Creek. We’ve toured all over Cape May County—battling waves in the Atlantic Ocean, gliding on the quiet backwaters of salt marshes, spying a bald eagle sailing over the Cape May Canal. We’ve kayak-camped along the Delaware River. We’ve paddled with dolphins in the Delaware Bay. 

I’ve seen my state in ways I never would have otherwise, seeing it with new eyes as the place of water it is.

 It’s been decades since we got the boats, and I’m still that resolute athlete who can plug along if you don’t ask me to go too fast. 

Sometimes I have to walk my bike up the hill. Sometimes I need help getting in and out of the kayak. But I’m still moving.

On this trip, we finally pass someone going slower than us—several young women standing on paddleboards, gracefully sweeping the water with their oars. I picture myself on one of those boards—could I even stand up, much less keep my balance? Maybe. I used to walk around the wall on the roof of the dorm at my first college when I was particularly unhappy there. But that was many years ago, and dorms do not have waves. And then I imagine myself perched on the board, my larger body in a bathing suit, awkward and old and my heavy legs in full view. 

And the next thing I think is—that looks like fun. I should try it.

When we get back to the launch, Michael gives me a hand getting out of the boat. The slant of the boat ramp works against me, and I almost lose my balance pulling myself to stand on my very wonky knees. What has happened to my joints? Basically, “sixty” has happened to them. Sixty years of walking, biking, child-raising, car accident, pacing classrooms, and yes, carrying this kayak to the water and back. 

I used to believe that a bone becomes stronger where it’s broken and subsequently healed. Apparently, that’s not true.

 When my bones broke and then healed, I was left with a lump of bone towards the top of my left shin, as the new bone molding around the shards of the old. It has smoothed out somewhat over the years, but never disappeared entirely. It has always hurt when I kneeled, the hard lump pressing into the flesh beneath. I have learned to never, ever, kneel.

It does not end up stronger. But it usually isn’t weaker either. It’s not the embraced imperfection of the cracks filled with gold veins of a Kintsugi bowl. It’s not the fragility of a silence held together by things never said; it’s just a different shape. And that makes all the difference.

So, I keep moving—walking, pedaling, paddling. Breathing. Reaching for the right words. Dipping my paddle from side to side. Testing my old bones on new waterways as long as I can.

***

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Silence is not an option

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Leslie Doyle
Leslie Doyle
Leslie Doyle's essays and fiction have appeared in MARY (Fiction Prizewinner), The Fourth River, The Forge, Gigantic Sequins, Signal Mountain Review, Electric Literature, Rougerou (flash fiction contest first place), Tupelo Quarterly Review (Best American Essays Notable), The New York Times, Brevity Blog, and elsewhere. She lives in New Jersey, writing full time after many years as a college writing instructor.
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