Objects created by man can be beautiful. You only have to look around you to find art, crafts, and simple everyday objects that bring instant joy. The swirling colors of a van Gogh painting. The pure functional simplicity of Shaker furniture. People make things so lovely that can make your chest ache just to look at them.
But it's strange that many things that are not lovely in their making, which are lovely in decay. Old barns may be too ramshackle to serve the purpose they once held, but their sagging roofs and sun-scorched beams hold a beauty the structure never achieved when intact. An old car left to rot in the wood becomes a fretwork of rusty curves, overrun with vines and pierced through by saplings. An old stone fence becomes a lichen-covered surprise, rearing up in woods that look otherwise primordial.
Even simple neglect can lend an object a strange dignity and life that it lacked when serving it's original purpose. And that's the case with the ghost canoe...
The ghost canoe appeared in the lake last summer. I first saw it on a stormy day with its aluminum gunwales hard against a granite block sea wall and rain-lashed white caps spilling their load into the canoe's interior. It was more than half sunk. It was all sunk. And when I saw that it wasn't there against the wall the next day, I assumed it had been either retrieved by its owner or slid down under the gray surface.
Then a few days later, I saw it again. This time it was floating in the center of the lake, with a snapping turtle riding its bow like the pilot of a boat. A few days after that I came across it tangled amidst some trees downed by our industrious beaver. Then it spent a week wedged under one of the docks so neatly that I thought it was locked in place. A couple of days later it was hugging the side of the island. Then scudding along quickly on a stormy day. Then laying up on a sandbar as neatly as if it had been beached by a party of scouts.
There's no identifier on the canoe. I don't know which house it goes with, and there are enough houses on the lake whose owners are rarely here that I suppose it's not surprising that no one has claimed it. And at this point, I hope no one does. I love to see the ghost canoe wandering around the lake. By now spotting it has become one of the pleasures of my daily paddle, and when it drifts up near my dock, it feels like a visit from a friend.
There are other lovely bits of decay around the lake. Under the shallow waters off one point are the mossy foundation stones of an old shed now two or three feet below the surface. On a tilting dock across the bay is a paddleboat whose plastic belly has turned pink from long exposure to the sun. There are at least a dozen docks that have fallen into disuse and are slowly sinking, splitting up, or simply falling apart. I love them all (apart from the one dock that has a habit of spitting out old blue-painted metal drums that were used as floats). Only the rest of them lack the personality of my wandering buddy.
So what objects near you have been turned from things to Things by time and exposure?