Chatham Nature Writing Blog: Prompt #2 Entry

The lake. The words are simple yet promise me escape and wonderment unlike any other place on Earth. “Something there isn’t that doesn’t love a wall,” Robert Frost one wrote about nature creating upheaval upon its shoulders where a wall had been built. I could not imagine a force so great as to disrupt a lake, whether manmade or not. Hurricanes ravage the sea and change its slope, its shoreline, its very appearance only to return to stasis once fury subsides. Torrential rains spill rivers over their banks, the muddying flow surges energy forward to rattle and scar nearly everything in its path, only to crest, be absorbed, retreat. The tsunami – forget it, such wrath is indescribable. But somehow a lake holds greater dignity no matter how much water deluges upon it. Somewhere I am sure there are damns and floodgates that withstand the forces of nature which a lake harnesses, but my position and posture are of distance, removal, safe haven.

The dock swings and dances upon artificial waves - wakes from speeding boats eclipsing some posted limit as if rules mean nothing. The bounce beats a rhythm unlike any salsa I could balance, unlike any mambo I could step. The pier is my skateboard, my waverider, a teeter-totter of surrender as I give into the waves, ride out their momentum, saunter. But these are only in my memory. The undulating rise and fall of gravity suspended are remnants of last summer’s get-away to pure-air elevations of escape. So high in the sky, the mountain lake captures the sun in a way the desert deflects its glare – unimpeded, accepting, translucent. The atmosphere is thin and cool, yet the sun is a mentor offering patient guidance. Just wait! The heat will surface and the lake will absorb and the day will stretch on timelessly.

It has been promised to my kids that one of these years we will go to Deep Creek Lake in Maryland in the depths of winter to see the lake, to maybe skate if safety allows, and to finally feel summer in January. For memory pulls me toward the water as if a time machine were my transport. At home, in Pittsburgh, under a pensive, crisp and mild February, something I cannot recall having lived through for any of my years, I think of the lake, of The Lake, of the place on the planet that beckons me with unfiltered passion and promises unabashed serenity.

No matter the season I can sense the water as it eluviates before me, a folding-fan’s open but creased flatness that stretches deep to the west, my left, and reaches up and high to my right, the east. My spot is shaped in the smiling rind of mauled-over watermelon, and its breadth as broad as fields of Iowa corn rolling into the horizon. Watching The Lake, my lake, must be what it means to stand at the farm and peer over the giant, heavenward stalks.

I stand on the shore, firmer, less ebullient than the dock, and cast a line or dip a toe into water that feels less like water and more like cool slips of syrup. The thickness isn’t slime, or muck, or year-upon-year of algae; rather it is a oneness with lake I have felt nowhere else. It is a cradle calling me home. I wish to die there.