I was reading an interview in the Paris Review with John McPhee today. At some point while he was speaking about the topics in which he is interested, primarily sports and the environment, the first line of the essay below popped in to my head. I couldn't shake it, so I started writing.
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The lake has the temper of a mistress. Warm and beckoning one moment, harsh and vindictive the next. Like a lady, she is often misunderstood and underestimated in both mood and resolve. Her character, often dormant beneath a mercurial surface, reveals its full dimension and aspect in impetuous moments, regardless of day and season. Often dismissed as pliable and impotent, just as often taken for granted, it is only after years that we see the lake has shaped the landscape and boundaries around it, rather than being shaped by them. Like glacial rocks rooted steadfast in a riverbed beneath a swiftly tilting current, it’s only after ages we understand that the water is the sculptor of destiny, not the eroding stones. If given enough time on an endless continuum, motion always subjugates the inert and the dormant.
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The lake has the temper of a mistress. Warm and beckoning one moment, harsh and vindictive the next. Like a lady, she is often misunderstood and underestimated in both mood and resolve. Her character, often dormant beneath a mercurial surface, reveals its full dimension and aspect in impetuous moments, regardless of day and season. Often dismissed as pliable and impotent, just as often taken for granted, it is only after years that we see the lake has shaped the landscape and boundaries around it, rather than being shaped by them. Like glacial rocks rooted steadfast in a riverbed beneath a swiftly tilting current, it’s only after ages we understand that the water is the sculptor of destiny, not the eroding stones. If given enough time on an endless continuum, motion always subjugates the inert and the dormant.
Geologically, thermodynamically, environmentally and practically she is the body which has compelled the surrounding world towards her gravity. Spiritually, intellectually and emotionally, however, Lake Michigan is much more important.
The Great Lakes all have their shades; Superior is a dreamscape, Huron is caught between worlds, Erie becomes her industrial history; Ontario, a snow-maker tipping over Niagra’s edge. Lake Michigan -- from trough to crest, rocky crags of its West to uninterrupted dunes of its Eastern shore . . . Southern sulfur to Northern lights -- lives a kaleidoscopic existence. In her artistic and cultural reaches she houses the same myriad of counterpoints, linking Hiawatha to Hemingway and Green Bay to Chicago. The lake exists outside the grasp of those who would seek to define and claim her. Elusive while being omnipresent.
On a middle-summer day drifting with a meandering current 15 miles offshore near the Illinois-Wisconsin border, the lake’s azure reflection gives life to a fading skyline shrinking southward into haze. Warm Midwest waters beckon for a swim under that sundrenched sky. Cool air rising from the calm surface holds shoreline clouds at bay in a manner which makes me feel haloed by good fortune.
On an August day in 2006 -- 35 miles offshore between Michigan City and Chicago -- a storm rolling off land near Kenosha veers sharply southeast emboldened by that same cool, sentinel air and plows across the water speeding hundred-mile-an-hour winds ahead of it, and the resultant surge of cresting waves. The marine radio blares for all vessels to seek safe harbor. Firefly lightning charges distant air off the starboard beam in a manner which makes me feel exposed to a measureless danger and depth.
It’s the sublime coalescence of horizon and heart. It’s the directionless fear of some infinite thing.
