July 9, 2007

On this summer’s day in heat that pulses in intensity, as shadows and an occasional current of disturbed air interrupt it, the lake is quiet.

Its edge is foul under its load of decaying vegetation, dead fish, skeletons of birds long gone, plastic detritus from picnics and passing small craft, the spent remains of millions of small insects. Past the fetid, pungent pockets of rising, nauseating gasses, far enough away from the area of contamination, a swimmer makes his way through cool water mixed poorly with warm. The water is clear, filtered by mussels that don’t belong here. The sun penetrates though, as it hasn’t in a hundred years, as it offers new opportunity to plants once displaced by algae fertilized beyond bearing by sewage and runoff from the fields to which the applied synthetics could not bind. As the swimmer disturbs the stillness of the water, setting currents into motion, the plants give off their pollen in clouds, which are slow to dissipate.

The lake bottom is limestone, itself the repository of death fixed in place by the excess of calcium carbonate that could no longer be held by the sea, not lake, which once covered large parts of the continent. It has been planed smooth by recurrent glaciers. Smooth is a relative term, as, on a smaller scale, striations remain as records of a grinding process, in which harder stones were held fast by the slow moving glacier against the softer limestone.

The swimmer passes over a varied bottom. In places there are areas of no vegetation, usually smooth flat planes. In other areas vegetation clings to the cracks in the stone as do the mussels that make it all visible. Ledges are host to fish, which sometimes flee and sometimes follow, as the swimmer passes. There are piles of stone, sometimes rows. These travelers, scoured from their original homes, have been dropped there by glacial ice. The force of waves and lake ice cannot move them. They are permanent, as permanent is to us, in a universe where nothing stays the same.

Over the swimmer the blue sky is burned white by the midday sun. Over the land, around the lake, white clouds billow up and move slowly on, moisture rising from an overheated land. Higher up wisps of cloud, precursors of what the afternoon will bring, drift slowly toward the east.

The swimmer knows the water will cool in a month or so, that, as the summer heat dissipates, the air will clear and the beaches wash clean. But in this heat it is the time for exploring in the water, as later he will explore along its edge. The lines of boulders that are before him in the water are green with growth, their color and structure obscured by a million living things. Perhaps today he will bring one or two to the shore to let the action of the water driving the tumbling of the beach pebbles abrade away the organic cloak that shields from view what the stones may offer. Perhaps he will find in one of them some reason to bring it to the studio, the work- bench. If not, he will have replaced along the shore elements of armor like those he had snatched away earlier on days the beach was hospitable and had offered them up for him and his tools.
Will the fish miss the stones, or the mussels or the grasses?