The first class on Romanticism I ever took was during a study abroad trip to England with Wheaton College. We read Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" at Tintern Abbey, and Keats' "Ode to a Nightengale" from the back porch of the house were he composed it. Its being an undergraduate course, and an abbreviated one (because summer) we didn't read from "The Prelude," Wordsworth's great autobiographical poem, whose most famous episode features the young poet stealing a boat and rowing it, full of guilt and fear and adrenaline, into the night. Since I hadn't read the poem then, I couldn't have known how ironic it was that, on my first trip to the poet's home region--The Lake District--I and some friends stole a boat at night, rowing out to the little island punctuating Lake Windermere. Partly, we just wanted to get out on the water and the rental place was closed. We would be leaving the next day. Partly, like the young Wordsworth 150 years prior, we just wanted to cross some lines. What happened was this.
We rehearsed the plan in the nearby field because there wouldn't be time for a dry run at the boat launch. This was a one-shot deal. OK. We would have to operate in complete silence because the rent-a-boat place was next-door to a lakefront hotel with balconies where the professors were staying.
The dark would cover us mostly, but not if someone heard us and really looked. We predetermined our seating order in the rowboat: who would man which oars, who would flip the boat, who, shoeless, would push us out into the water before jumping in himself. No words until we were 20 feet out from shore.
Like a little mute militia we skated over the black water, Taylor and I rowing in graceful unison. Chatter drifted over the water from adjacent balconies. Over the lap of the water and in the moonlight, we saw, vaguely a rising and falling pitch of sleeping birds. Do birds really sleep in the water, I wondered for the first time? We tried to row around the colony, but were terrified out of silence by the crack of 100 wings lifting suddenly the hitherto slumbering mass. They're cawing was like an explosion in the quiet.
Changing tack, we abandoned stealth and opted instead for speed. Pulling against the disturbed water, we could've been young William Wordsworth who also stole about when he was young on lakes just like these. We got to the little island and someone had brought cigars--probably Mr. M. who went on to a Ph.D. at Yale and to become a theologian-- and someone else, which I find amusing now but delightful then, brought a loaf cake. I had some peaches and gingerbread. We picnicked on the small island laying back to watch the stars, laughing about the birds, and contemplating danger. And then, another problem.
The vessel was part of the fleet of rental boats by the shore. We were writers, philosophers, and theologians. We couldn't very well borrow a craft meant to be rented hourly, whether in business hours or out of them without paying for it. Not ethically, I mean. After, naturally, much debate, we calculated the hourly rate for our number at 35 GBP thinking to slip it under the booth's door. But paying for it wouldn't undo the crime. Besides, what would they think happened, walking in one morning for find a few bills on the ground? We needed to explain, but not in such a way that the crime could be traced to us. What if it were? Would we be thrown off the trip? Thrown out of school? Does the UK deport rowdy American law-breakers? Do they jail them?
Eventually, we settled on the text: "five blokes, two hours, John 3:16." We chose "blokes" so they wouldn't assume we were the American visitors: clever I thought, and a Bible verses so that they'd know why, having committed the crime and gotten away with it, we were so scrupulous as to pay for the rental anyway.
We slept hard following the late night, having gotten in around 3 am, so the next morning seemed dreamy still when I rolled over in my bunk, which was placed up against the window, to look out of the lake to see the girl I liked in a swimming suit for the very first time just as she leapt from the dock into the morning water.