The Night Boat
Hi! I’m Sasha and I have lived and traveled in an RV since 2018 with my partner and dog, the raccoon-slayer. If you’re new here, I’d love if you’d subscribe to my weekly newsletter about little travel stories.
I had never seen a police boat before, not in real life. Especially not at night.
On the back of the maroon couch, the dog’s head was resting as she watched the world outside go by. We’d snagged a beautiful green spot on an inlet of the Tenessee, and we watched herons as the fog surrounded us like a damp gray shawl.
This was probably in September of last year. It’s funny how hard it is to remember dates, places. When we travel quickly, each morning I say to myself, here am I? It’s like all those cheesy movies when someone wakes up and forgets where they are - but instead, it’s actually my life. Luckily, I’m usually reminded quickly when I open my blinds.
So, yes, where was I? Sometime in September. Somewhere in Tennesee. The night had fallen, and it’s likely that I was stirring my vodka-some-concoction with a bamboo straw.
“Jeremiah,” I whispered across the motorhome. I’m not sure why I whispered, and there’s no way he could hear through his noise-canceling headphones. Maybe I whispered so I could touch this moment by myself before sharing it.
I could hear a boat, at night, and it felt strange.
Not sun-just-set-nighttime. No, dark dark night. No human fishes at night on the makeshift creek off the Tennessee River outside of a campground. The dog pressed closer to the window, and a slight whine wheezed from her nose.
A minute passed, and a second minute. Then, it came into view; the blue and red lights of a police boat reflected off the otherwise calm water.
I remembered a weekend years earlier when I’d sat in a hot tub at an Airbnb watching Christmas lights reflect off a lake from homes across the way. I had told myself then that one day, I would live on a lake, purely to see the reflection of other homes’ Christmas lights for a month out of the year. The joy of Christmas lights, without having to put up my own.
The police boat puttered near the edges of the campground before throwing a large yellowy-white light onto the edges of the trees.
Who were they searching for? I imagined the rush, the fear, the adrenaline running through the veins of whoever had escaped or otherwise hidden themselves away from their deeds.
Were they hiding in the trees? Clinging to the pine and deciduous, sap sticking to their fingers?
Did they have an obscene lung capacity, able to sink below the black inky surface, to dive
dive
dive
dive down into the abyss of the night creek?
Waiting. Closed eyes, the blues and reds and spotlight itching at their vision, lighting the darkness even through shut eyelids, feet below the surface of the water. I pictured them cross-legged, holding their ankles, meditating, sitting in the silt of the slow-moving creek, releasing bubbles small enough to be mistaken for a frog’s breath trickling to the top of the water, popping almost silently.
Beyond the ridge of the creek was a road. Mirroring the boat, the vehicle ran its metronomed reds and blues, lighting up the pavement as police cars crept along the road.
I tapped on Jeremiah’s shoulder, and he came to watch the lights circle the inlet of the creek. For an hour and a half, we waited, thinking any minute we’d get a knock at our motorhome door to ask if we had seen anything suspicious.
But the knock never came.
We opened the window, listening, but heard nothing more than the hum of the boat when it was near us. I don’t think the herons much liked being disturbed in the middle of the night.
In the morning, the police boat was gone, so we scoured the local news to see if there was any mentioning, glanced through the local police blotter. No missing persons (phew!) and no crime near the river. Nothing.
It was as though the event that seemed so alien to us had never occurred. (You’d be surprised at how often that happens - like the time an entire carnival arrived and surrounded our rig while we slept at a local campground - an event I’d totally forgotten in the way I often forget my dreams, until just now.)
When I think about it now, I realize the night boat, with its beautiful reflective lights, was likely a police training, but that seems such a let-down. What I’d rather believe: a man or woman pushed towards the surface of the water just as the sun rose. Then, they dried themselves near an egret on the treed edge of the creek, watching as campers slowly rose to build fires and take their dogs for walks along the shore.
Thanks for traveling with me,
Sasha
P.S. Let me know if you want to hear more about that carnival. You can leave that comment by pressing this cool orange button.
Down the rabbit hole:
The creek we were staying at was called Poland Creek, and every year, the creek was drained several feet down in the autumn when there were fewer boaters and fishermen, so it makes sense that police would have been doing training before it was drained.
According to the Tennessee Water Authority, “on average, 10 billion gallons of water were withdrawn daily from the Tennessee River Watershed in 2015,” but 96% of that was returned to the river. Pretty impressive.