Shoreline Sleuthing!
By Mary Anne Smrz
Published by NBCS, Inc. at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Mary Anne Smrz
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Email: red-kayak@comcast.net
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Shoreline Sleuthing!
When I was a young girl in grammar school, I loved to read the Nancy Drew books. Nancy Drew was a fictional young amateur detective created by Edward Stratemeyer. The books were ghostwritten by a number of authors and were published under the collective pseudonym Carolyn Keene. Nancy first appeared in 1930 and the books were extensively revised from 1959-1971. She is considered a cultural icon, and has been cited as a formative influence by a number of prominent women, from Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Sonia Sotomayor to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and former First Lady Laura Bush.
I could hardly wait until each new edition came out. My Mom and I would get the book and I’d stay up half the night reading page after glorious page. Nancy Drew, being the daughter of a lawyer, was adept at solving mysteries, and every book brought a new challenge. Each chapter ended with a suspenseful occurrence and I could hardly put the book down. At that time, books by Stratemeyer were also published about the Dana Girls and the Hardy Boys, but for me there was nothing like Nancy Drew.
The entire 51-book collection has been sitting on a shelf in my Mom’s basement all these years. Recently, I decided to re-read those books in sequence this summer, to recollect and garnish what I loved so dearly about Nancy Drew. Sometimes, we must journey back to our childhood. We revisit the things we loved that remind us of our true essence. I decided to take this journey, to see if there are nuggets in those books that I have kept with me through the years. Hidden clues to remind me of my own truths.
I have just read the first two. Book one, The Secret of the Old Clock, is how Nancy discovers a hidden will of Josiah Crowley’s in a mantel clock. All the proper heirs who almost got skunked out of an inheritance by some other undeserving relatives receive their just reward. Book two, The Hidden Staircase, has Nancy solving the mystery of a “ghost” in a house where two elderly women live. She finds a hidden staircase connected to another home on the property. People who were scaring these women into selling the house used this secret passage as their access to the elderly women’s home. Nancy’s discovery leads to the capture and arrest of the villains, and the house is spared. Great stuff!
What I have re-discovered about her in these first two books, is that she loves to go out sleuthing and can’t wait until her next adventure. I can connect with that. I, too, can’t wait for my next undertaking and this morning’s weather presented a perfect kayaking opportunity. The temperature is 53˚, the winds are just a breeze from the east at 2mph and it is partly cloudy. The water is perfectly calm. This is what I call a “banner morning”! After paddling last month in the snow, donned in layers of winter garb, this morning’s conditions called for my Life is Good™ paddling shorts and a t-shirt. Paddling as it should be! Like Nancy Drew, I was anxious for my morning’s adventure to begin to do some “shoreline sleuthing” of my own.
I love to paddle the shoreline to see what treasures I might find. Today I am sleuthing for sticks that have washed up on shore. About 4-5’ high with interesting characteristics and shapes and a good thickness about them. I have recently invented my own hobby of making walking sticks from these shoreline treasures. They are quite deluxe if I say so myself – complete with an embedded compass and hash marks on the bottom six inches of the stick to measure depths of water one might encounter while hiking along.
While paddling along the shoreline this morning, my mind drifted back to my younger days. At about the same time as I began reading Nancy Drew, my family took annual summer vacations to northern Wisconsin. At one point during the week there, I would take the rowboat out and circumvent the shoreline of the lake, looking for interesting pieces of driftwood to bring home. I’d then bleach them, and sand and stain them on my Dad’s workbench in his garage. I’d create pieces you could hang or pieces that looked good on a shelf. I still have some of those early creations and I remember how much fun I had working with the wood.
Today is a good day for gathering sticks. The calm water allows me to kayak close to the rocky shore without being battered about and I collect some real keepers. I get lost in the search, watching each new set of rocks with an eye toward an interesting stick. Soon, my kayak looks more like a barge as I pile stick after stick on my front bow and hatch. Before I know it, two hours have passed and I have a collection of 12 sticks which will eventually be transformed into walking sticks. I’ve also picked up a few other interesting pieces of driftwood which I carefully balance on the hatch behind me. Now I am really sleuthing!
Sometimes, when I am paddling with my friend, Mary, we do some sleuthing together, calling it our “service project”. I’m really not sure why we call it that, but we take my other smaller kayak, tie it to the back of hers, and fill it with all sorts of interesting things we gather from the shore. Like the sea shells Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote about in Gift from the Sea, we collect our own special “gifts from the lake”. Mary would be proud of my collection today.
I now recognize however, that I am out of room on my little red vessel for any more shoreline treasures! But then I see one other interesting piece I just have to have, and shove it in the cockpit of my boat. I feel the wind picking up slightly and decide to head back home. I turn my kayak around very slowly careful not to lose any of my haul. The temperature has climbed to 70˚ and the wind is now coming from the ESE at 10mph. It may not seem like much of a wind but with my kayak loaded with my wooden gifts, I am grateful that the wind is at my back.
My paddling strokes are very short and choppy as the sticks strewn across my kayak hinder my ability to use a full stroke. It will take me longer to get back home, but it is worth it. In the enjoyment of this morning’s paddle, I rediscovered my childhood love of collecting driftwood. My shoreline sleuthing has been fun and full of interesting treasures. Nancy Drew would be proud!
Do you need to revisit a happy place back in your childhood? Is there a memory of a time where you enjoyed something with so much passion that it makes you smile just thinking about it? What clues would that give you about your life now? Try to get out on the shoreline of your life today, recreate those moments for yourself and do a little sleuthing of your own!
About the Author
Mary Anne Smrz is a paddler, who uses insights gained on the water to enrich her own life and the lives of others. In her life of outdoor passions, she kayaks, loves to spend time in nature and hikes with her yellow lab, Bayfield. She writes from her home in Wisconsin. The balance and focus she gains from being “of the water” enriches every facet of her life and career.
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