If I could somehow get a stereo system for a lake while I kayak, I would listen to one singular piece of music while on the water with paddle. Mahler, Symphony No.3 in D Minor, First Movement, and no other music would suffice. And I don't want a hand held radio or earphones, I want a lake with a surround sound stereo. I'd start the listening, with a cup of coffee and launch just a few snare drum beats before sunrise. I wouldnt even let the blade touch the water until the two minute mark and not a two seat canoe, but a lone cockpit as I would have no one interrupt me or the music. For one glorious morning, I wouldn't even tolerate a loon when the eight horns resound. I'd wear a summer shirt and some cut off blue jeans. Not a sock or wading shoe to boot. Maybe a pink slice of clouds drifting across the eastern horizon and that would be all the curtain call I'd need to commence. I'd have found me a sheet of glass flat water for the thirty minutes of the first movement along a stone studded shoreline and that would have me so far removed from any thoughts of wonder, work, or worry. I know this from many a nights listening to the great symphony doing nothing more than hanging in my hammock on warm summer nights in my screen enclosed deck looking at my pond without any recall of a thought as that music plays. The music comes up, and my mind just floats away to I know not where, or care. For the first ten minutes I often wonder if my breathing changes. I can't ever remember when the percussion gives way to the woodwinds, it's only when the brass has high command that I sense any change. At about the twenty minute mark the composer hastened the tempo, my kayak strokes would match as if the composer's wand could direct me and I would turn, perhaps racing towards shore, just like the very music itself. Then at the twenty three minute mark, as the music's crescendo subsides I would slow myself, cool off and may for abit even drift as the sun's rays would skein across the lake, the music fades and I land softly on a sandy shoal. Pulling the kayak out of the water at 28 minutes the impetuous finale would have me, with no one else watching, dare I say with a wee bit of pomp and circumstance, march right back to a pot of coffee, pour a second cup and regally commence a day. The trout whisperer