Like most inlanders, I love boats. I don’t fish, I just like to be in a boat and out on the water. It’s a pastime I now enjoy only in memory. Never graceful, I am now brought by age to a state of what can only be described as incredible awkwardness. Not the sort of thing that lets you wend your way aboard a boat.

In my younger days, I not only passed my boating test &045; being able to identify bow and stern, knowing the difference and being able to both row and backwater, demonstrating how to pull to right angle of a motorboat and the like, knowing which side of the river to be on &045; but I was so good at it that I was able to teach it at various camps for young girls.

At the camps where I was sent, you couldn’t use a canoe until you passed your life-saving test. Even then you still had to pass a canoe test. The instructor without warning upset the canoe and you were expected to right it and climb back in. I can’t remember all the requirements at this late date. It seems to me there was something about swimming 60 feet and then getting back in the upright canoe.

Back in the golden yesteryear, it presented no problem. In fact I rather enjoyed the drill. At present if I had to lift myself from a lake into a rowboat, I think I’d choose to just keep swimming.

I passed my life-saving test as soon as I was old enough. You were supposed to renew it every three years at that time. My father, though, who took a dim view of the people I went swimming with, insisted that I renew it every year. This I did until I graduated from the U and settled in places where at that time there was no place to take the test.

It was when I was in Italy several years ago that I realized that the difficulty I had entering and exiting from boats was sufficient to keep me out of them. I didn’t ride in a gondola &045; too expensive. Instead, I rode in one of the brisk little water taxis. I tottered every time I entered one and I tottered every time I exited one. I wasn’t afraid of falling overboard and drowning, but I had a strong disclination to drown in the water of those canals.

It was some time after I returned from Italy as I remember that I was invited to spend a long weekend on a houseboat on the Mississippi. No difficulty to getting on a houseboat.

It was an adventure, however, that once I was embarked on it, carried a certain uneasiness. As I have revealed before in this column, I come from a family that abounds in sleep disorders. Sleep disorders! You name it, we’ve got it &045; apnea, somnambulism and screaming nightmares.

I loved the houseboat; if it were not for the frigid winters we have in the Midwest, I could enjoy living on a houseboat the year around. The evil thought did come to me that it was not impossible that should I be caught up in one of my sleep impelled strolls I might well walk off the boat into the water.

I was optimistic enough to hope that once awakened by my submergence, I would at once start swimming. If you’ve ever walked in your sleep, though, you know that to be suddenly awakened is to find yourself totally disoriented. It was possible that I was as likely to swim toward the bottom of the river as to find myself swimming toward the surface.

I hoped that should such a catastrophe occur, my host wouldn’t have too sticky a time explaining my disappearance. One doesn’t like to be a thoughtless guest.

(Love Cruikshank is an Albert Lea resident. Her column appears Thursdays.)