I was chatting with one of my neighbors the other day and she said she felt out of kilter, that the balance of her life was off. She felt like she was listing one way, then the other, that she was never on an even keel, maybe even in danger of going under. I knew exactly what she meant. I feel it, too.

I’m not much of a sailor—in fact, I’m not a sailor at all—but isn’t there a point at which a ship that is so far over in the water can’t right itself? The point at which gravity inevitably takes over and we do a slow roll, ending up keel to the sky? The moment when our equilibrium is irretrievably gone and our ability to rebound—our resiliency—is lost? Seems to me we’re awfully close to moment. Call it our human tipping point.

These days, everything is coming at us at warp speed: the great political divide; a global pandemic; an economic meltdown; our long and sad history of racial injustice. Big things. So when the little things start to happen—as they inevitably do—we’re already listing so far to port or starboard that it’s the little thing—the ice maker that won’t make ice or the flat tire or the telemarketer who calls at dinner—that sends us ‘round the bend. When everything else is roiled, the weight of that final straw might be negligible, but it can be enough to sink the ship.

I’m sure all this isn’t a new or original thought; in fact, it’s likely an over-worked metaphor, one that made Malcolm Gladwell a rich man years ago. But sometimes all it takes is a simple conversation with a friendly neighbor to crystalize a thought, to bring even an over-worked metaphor into focus. Physical balance is not complicated: it’s a condition in which different elements are equal or at least in the correct proportion. But human balance—emotional balance—is much more complicated. Each of us assigns differing values to those conditions that affect us so what’s a relatively minor inconvenience to you might be a deal-breaker or head-on collision to me. But now, or so it seems to me, there are so many meteors in the current shower heading our way each day that it’s almost inevitable one will crash into us and send up one of those life-extinguishing dust clouds that did in the dinosaurs. The tipping point has become the breaking point.

Mine is generally not a gloom-and-doom nature. My glass is almost always half full. But with each passing day, the half-full portion seems to grow smaller and I worry that I’ll wake up one morning like Eeyore: a pessimistic, gloomy, anhedonic, thistle-eating old grey donkey that can’t help but see the worst in everything and everyone. As much as I like Eeyore the character, I don’t want to become him; the wee wife would not be pleased. No; I want to be more like Anne of Green Gables: cheerful in the face of disappointment, always able to see the rainbow that comes after the storm.

So how do I regain my equilibrium, my balance? November 3 might help; so would a vaccine; so would racial reconciliation. But these are big things, almost beyond my ken. I guess I’ll have to start smaller: fix the screen door, put another coat of varnish on the gunwales of the canoe, weed the garden. I really don’t want to be out-of-balance any more; I need a dose of what my neighbor—a former consultant—calls ‘change management.’ I can take some pitch and yaw—after all, that’s life—but please, Lord, keep my kilter within reasonable limits. Is that too much to ask?

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer with a home in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon. Jamie’s website is www.musingjamie.com

When I left you last week, I was heading west on the New York State Thruway, Arcturus strapped securely atop my car. I remember the outline of that day more than its detail. It was late-July hot; the weather was unsettled, there were radio reports of microbursts along the way. It was early in the afternoon and I figured that if all went well—and why wouldn’t it?—I would be home by ten or eleven that night.

When Icarus flew too near the sun, the gods conspired to treat his hubris with the contempt it deserved. The heat of the sun melted the wax that held his feathered wings together and down he fell—down, down, down into the sea.

There was no gasping moment of fall, no crack of sound, no jolt. There was simply a sensation that made me glance in my rearview mirror. And what I saw there defied any kind of rational response: a red canoe tumbling, tumbling over and over behind me down the middle of three lanes on the busy New York State Thruway. A second or two passed, a lightless gap between what I saw and what I understood. It was my canoe—Arcturus—that was flying backwards into streams of summer traffic. And then the panic set in.

I swerved into the right lane, then onto the shoulder. I backed up as fast as I could, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred yards, cars and behemoth semis whizzing by me. My heart was pounding, I felt sick to my stomach. I waited for the inevitable crash that would come when one of those giant tractor-trailers would reduce Arcturus to a million splinters before careening into other vehicles in neighboring lanes. It would be a horrific disaster.

Now I was alongside where Arcturus lay, somehow miraculously parallel within the middle lane. It was a straight stretch of road and the oncoming vehicles were moving left and right, weaving around Arcturus, somehow managing to miss it by inches. Suddenly, there was a tiny seam in the flow and I ran into the middle lane and with adrenaline surging through my body, lifted Arcturus which was somehow still attached to the carry rack that was, until a few moments ago, affixed to the top of my car, and scampered back across one lane, now miraculously empty of traffic, to the relative safety of the highway shoulder. I was in shock.

Which was when the state trooper pulled up behind me. I could barely speak, let alone begin to tell him what had just happened. That a microburst had lifted Arcturus—rack and all—off the top of my car and sent it spinning down the highway. That somehow the rack had taken the brunt of the hit and that the damage seemed minimal—I could see a hairline crack along a few ribs and a small abrasion of the canvas covering—but otherwise the canoe looked remarkably intact. The trooper said what I knew to be true: that it was a miracle the canoe was not smashed and that no one had been injured or killed.

I started to breathe again but I was still paralyzed with fear. Now what was I going to do? I was an hour down the Thruway in the middle of nowhere with an injured canoe and a roof rack that had been ripped off my car and was now likely unserviceable. Slowly, slowly, my brain began to function again and it seemed that my only hope was to somehow get Arcturus reattached to my car and carry on toward home.

To this day, I cannot explain how the rack separated from the top of my car; or how Arcturus managed to tumble along one thin lane of highway before coming to rest exactly within it; or how some unseen hand parted the waters, allowing me to run out into the middle of the New York State Thruway and haul one hundred pounds of Arcturus and rack to safety; or how the frame of that rack was not impossibly bent and fitted back on top of my car. The state trooper stayed with me, watching, probably wondering why this was not a disaster of horrific proportion and why wasn’t the canoe secured atop my car in the first place. I wondered the same thing.

Once the canoe was reattached to the top of my car, I cautiously made my way down the highway, hazard lights flashing until I could pull into a rest stop. That’s when another thought hit me. How could I tell Jack that his beautiful baby—his handcrafted beauty—had sustained injury and would require surgical repair. I couldn’t take the boat back to Canada; Arcturus would be in limbo until I could head back north the following summer.

So now I’ll make this long story shorter. I drove home slowly, very slowly, arriving well after midnight, but nevertheless arriving, boat still atop car. The following day, I had time to carefully inspect the damage and somehow it was as minimal as it appeared. Twelve months later, I headed back to Canada and Jack repaired the cracked ribs. The abrasion on the canvas only need a little sanding and a fresh coat of paint. Rather than berate me, Jack laughed and marveled at how sturdy his little baby was. With a twinkle in his eye, he stills tells the story of the time his Bobs Special went surfing down the New York State Thruway.

And I still wonder about all of it: the moment of unfastening, the sheer luck of Arcturus coming to rest in the center lane, the miraculous absence of disaster, the long, slow, nerve-wracking drive home, wondering if the rack would hold, the exhausted relief at the end of the journey.

Icarus was the son of Daedalus, who, like my friend Jack, was a master craftsman. “Be careful,” Daedalus told his son, “don’t be complacent and fly too low, but neither be overly proud and fly too high.” It seems to me that maybe life is somewhere in between, maybe in the center lane.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer with a home in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon. Jamie’s website is www.musingjamie.com

Jack Hurley, a Buffalo native, moved to Canada many years ago to build canoes. He settled n Dwight, Ontario, a dot on the map not far from the western portal of the Algonquin National Park, a wilderness area of nearly 3,000 square miles. There are more bear, moose, beaver, and loons than people in the park which is iced in for at least five months every year. There is but one road through the park; otherwise travel is on foot or by canoe along the Oxtongue River or through a series of pristine lakes connected haphazardly by portage trails. There are campsites throughout the park, but a paddler can go for days without seeing another human being. Jack loved it.

I was introduced to Jack by one of my oldest and dearest friends who was the proud owner of one of Jack’s canvas and cedar-strip canoes. I was living in Washington at the time and didn’t have much use for a fine canoe, but Jack’s craftsmanship was so overwhelming that I decided to purchase one. We agreed on a design: Jack’s interpretation of a Bobs Special, a fifteen-plus foot, keeled canoe named for Lord Frederick Roberts (his nickname was Bobs), a beloved senior commander in the South African Boer Wars. The first Bobs Special was built early in the 20th Century and over the years, the design has changed very little. It’s a versatile craft, paddled easily by one but plenty comfortable for two. I wanted mine painted cardinal red.

It would take Jack a year to build my canoe. Or so he said. I imagine what really happened in the twelve intervening months from the day Jack and I shook hands until the day I returned to Dwight was that with about two months to go, Jack and his “team,” a lovely young female apprentice, went into overdrive to construct my boat.

Jack is a master builder but building a canvas and cedar canoe is more an act of love or work of art than a construction project. The technique is centuries old and involves clenching thin cedar ribs to a steamed frame, then covering the hull with a drum-tight canvas skin. While the hull cured, Jack worked on the thwarts and gunwales, made of ash and also steam-bent. We had decided on gut seats, more comfortable and durable than traditional cane. As a gift, Jack fashioned a yoke crafted of cherry to mine for easier carrying. Finally, several coats of bright red marine paint were applied to the hull, sealing and weatherizing it. It was deemed dry and lake-worthy a day or two before I arrived back in Dwight in the summer of 2005.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw my canoe. It glistened, redder-than-red, varnished inside to a high gloss that took my breath away. I couldn’t wait to take it on the lake, and when I did, it was everything I had hoped for and more. It tracked well and whether in the pre-dawn stillness or under a canopy of stars, I felt one with the water around me. I named my canoe Arcturus after one of the brightest stars visible from the Northern Hemisphere.

I was careful that summer and learned the whereabouts of every underwater rock that might scrape a bit of paint off hull—or worse. Our camp sits comfortably on a lake that’s three miles long and a mile wide and every day, I paddled in and out of quiet coves and through lily pads covered with bright lotus blossoms. I watched beavers building a dam, sat quietly while the loons fished and talked to each other, even paddled gently behind a deer swimming across the lake at sunset. Arcturus took me everywhere, silently, secretly. At a store in Huntsville, the only town of any size for miles around, I bought a thwart bag and a red woolen toque and imagined myself one of those old Canadian voyageurs with a canoe full of pelts to trade for whiskey.

When it came time to pack up and make the long drive home, I secured Arcturus to the top of the car, packed up my gear, and headed south. Four hours later, I crossed the border at the Peace Bridge and once across the Niagara River, I found my way onto the New York State Thruway heading west. If all went well, Arcturus and I be home in about eight hours.

If. Such a small, little word…

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer with a home in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon. Jamie’s website is www.musingjamie.com

Using military force to quell civic dissent sometimes produces unintended consequences. It may be momentarily effective, but in the long run, authoritarianism tends to exacerbate unrest, not eradicate it. King George III, in his moments of lucidity, probably pondered this conundrum, but alas, he was too late. Perhaps, had he chosen another means of dealing with his American colonies, we’d all still be speaking with British accents and singing “God Save the Queen.”

Whether in Lafayette Square, Buffalo, or Minneapolis, peaceful protests have been set upon by excessive shows of force, sometimes by local police, other times by unidentified paramilitary units of dubious origin. The images of these confrontations are startling; our first reaction is to think ‘that can’t be happening here!’ But it is. The good news is—if there’s any to be found— that these blatant displays of power have only swelled the dissent, most of it peaceful. It’s too bad that bunkers don’t have windows because if they did, those within might see that their strategies of “dominating the streets” are having exactly the opposite effect of what they intended.

It was Robert K. Merton, a professor of sociology at Columbia University, who popularized the concept of the law of unintended consequences. He actually posited three types of unintended consequences: unexpected benefits, unexpected drawbacks, and perverse results. It’s the last of these—the perverse results hypothesis—that creates outcomes that actually make the problem one is trying to solve, worse. Sound familiar?

There is another dimension to the problem of using brute force to quell dissent: it allows those on the extreme fringes of an issue—on the left or the right—to set the terms of the debate. Problems are rarely, if ever, solved when the discourse surrounding them becomes so fractious, so contentious, that the center, the place where consensus abides, is drowned out by the clamor of the extremists living out on the fringes of the debate. Resolution must come from the center and radiate outward; an outward-in model can only serve to polarize those good folk in the middle who are trying to find an acre or two of common ground.

In my lifetime, only the protests against the Viet Nam war and the riots of 1968 that followed on the heels of the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. come close to what we’re experiencing now. The apogee of tension came at the Democratic Convention in Chicago: President Lyndon Johnson had announced he would not seek reelection which set the stage for a referendum on the war in Asia and on America’s ongoing struggle with social and racial injustice. The lines that were drawn by those confrontations—like the lines we’re witnessing now—are etched in my memory. I thought maybe they would fade with time, but I was wrong. They are as abhorrent now as they were then and so the struggle must go on.

Unintended consequences are nothing new. Thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith wrestled with the problem long before Professor Merton popularized the term. The crux of the issue lies in the idea that politicians and generals can fully control the world around them. Try as they might, other elements always seem to intercede. It seems to me that the lesson we need to truly learn is the lesson of humility, that only by listening and seeking to understand what lies at the core of a problem can a solution be found. Empathy never required tear gas or rubber bullets.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer with a home in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon. Jamie’s website is www.musingjamie.com

As if a global pandemic of epic proportion were not enough; as if Covid-19 hadn’t already killed more than 370,000 people worldwide and that 105,000 of those deaths did not occur right here in the United States; (By my reckoning, that’s more than 28% of the world’s deaths, despite being only 4% of the world’s population.) As if there were not new infections, new hospitalizations, and new deaths every day; as if our first responders and frontline heroes were not already overworked and underpaid; as if this disease did not target people of color and low-income populations with deadly accuracy; as if an effective and affordable vaccine were not still months and months away; as if cases of child and spousal abuse were not already at dangerous levels before quarantining was imposed and fear and frustration mounted…

As if the economic devastation caused by the coronavirus were not enough to cause more than 40 million people to lose their jobs and the unemployment rate to soar to 20%; as if small business owners were not in danger of losing their livelihood and what they have worked so hard to create; as if people were not standing in long lines just to get enough food to feed to eat…

As if this year’s crop of high school and college graduates were sadly unable to celebrate their accomplishments and milestones; as if schools and colleges and churches across the country were not locked down to prevent further contagion; as if many schools and institutions of higher learning were not already struggling to stay afloat in the stormy seas of declining enrollment and rising costs…

As if the climate of our planet were not already in peril; as if coastal areas were not already in danger of inundation due to rising sea levels; as if searing heat and devastating droughts did not already plague many countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America; as if famine were not a real concern for millions of people across the globe; as if needless pollution and misguided environmental policies did not already cause enormous harm to human and animal populations around the world…

As if the leaders of our country were not already incompetent and insensitive; as if our political system were not already dysfunctional, if not outright broken; as if our elected leaders did not already foment hatred, racism, misogyny, and xenophobia; as if our body politic were not already hopelessly divided; as if greed and self-interest did not already supersede rational policies that could provide quality health care and opportunity for all…

As if there were not already enough fear and hatred dividing us; as if justice for all were not denied or stymied by the very ones charged with protecting our civil liberties and freedoms; as if some people were incarcerated for minor offenses while others who have committed far more heinous crimes against the state have gone free…

As if all that and more were not already enough, now there’s this: there has been another needless death of a black man at the hands of white police officers; there is more rioting and violent confrontations with law enforcement; there are more nights of anger and frustration boiling over in cities across the land; there are more examples of the abysmal failure of anything resembling temperate, humane, and moral leadership; there is more denial, more obfuscation, more outright lies…

As if all this were not true, and sadly it is, there is still this: hope.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer with a home in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon. Jamie’s website is www.musingjamie.com