Little Lakes And Ponds
Kim Chinquee
Now that I finally make it to the boathouse, I want to row. I moved to Buffalo sixteen years ago, and its waters have always intrigued me. I grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin outside of Green Bay, and there are little lakes and ponds where my family would go for a break from chores, getting leeches on our skin that my dad would burn off with his matches. After my dad’s breakdown and my parents’ divorce, and moving to Green Bay, swimming wasn’t allowed in the bay, though sometimes us teens would jump over the fence and immerse ourselves. I don’t remember many waves there. I don’t remember why swimming wasn’t allowed. I hardly remember the defiance.
There was also a man-made lake called Ashwaubomay where my friends and I would ride our bikes to in the summertime. We weren’t old enough to drive yet. And our parents didn’t seem to care where we were. It was the 1980s, and having grown up on a farm and then having moved into what I see now as not exactly a big city, I wasn’t sure what it meant to have a parent. A few of my friends seemed to have them, perhaps, but what I remember most is the absence, parties in basements and garages, a place called Larry’s Woods, and if you were cool, you knew the trails, and if you had a car and/or someone to drive you, you knew how to get there. It seemed fun then, I suppose, but as soon as summertime was over, we’d be back in the stroller land of classes, hallways, the candlestick lands of our teachers. And certain parents unlike mine who seemed pretty good at least pretending they cared about our futures.
After high school and joining the air force, I was stationed in Biloxi. I married a man who was practically raised on the ocean, at least that’s what he told me. He grew up in Jamaica, and after I had our baby, I loved taking the baby out to the Gulf. The shore was so shallow it seemed I could walk for miles before finding any danger.
That marriage didn’t last. There was a war. He was deployed. He volunteered. The war wasn’t so much about us until I got used to him being gone. I suppose he came back different, but perhaps I was the one who changed more.
But that was years ago, and I came to Buffalo after my son, our son, graduated from high school. By then, my ex had remarried, had more children, grew his own family.
After moving to Buffalo, I maybe had some sense of a direction, when it came to my career. My second job as a professor. I was less directed, when it came to the logistics of north and south and east and west. I remember driving around after first arriving, wondering where I was: what body of water connected one to the other. There’s Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, and how is that connected to Lake Huron, over the bridge that I just crossed over from where I lived in Mount Pleasant. And Lake Superior, and Lake Michigan, off the bay from where I grew up in Wisconsin: this lake and that lake and that other lake.
I’m not a stupid person. I ride my bike all over the place now and the trails have helped me find my way. They connect one river to another, one lake to the next, and sometimes I ride to the top of a bridge where one can see the traffic of the Peace Bridge, connecting one country to another. And when one looks down, one can see the water underneath, the break wall.
And that’s where I am now with my crew. We’re together on a boat that, as a team, we’ve lifted out of the house and put into the water. And—from a separate motorboat that we’ve also launched—out of a megaphone, our coach spouts out commands aimed for the coxswain, who reiterates her words much louder on a speaker. I hold my oar. I’m in position number two. There are terms that I’ve just learned like hold water, let it run. And when I’m called to do a soft row or a full, I damn straight follow through.
Kim Chinquee is the author of eight books, most recently Pipette (Ravenna Press, 2022). In 2025, her prose poetry collection Contact with the Wild and flash fiction collection Octopus Arms are forthcoming with MadHat Press, and her novella I Thought of England will be published by Baobab Press.Herwork has been published in journals and anthologies including NOON, Conjunctions, StoryQuarterly, Indiana Review, Ploughshares, The Nation, Notre Dame Review, Story, Fiction, F(r)iction, Post Road, Buffalo Noir, and many others. She’s received three Pushcart Prizes, serves as editor for New World Writing Quarterly, Midwest Review, and ELJ (Elm Leaves Journal), and directs the writing major at SUNY-Buffalo State University.