I live just 40 minutes from Lake Michigan, my inland sea, and I get out there whenever possible, in air so fresh and cold you think it'll shear your throat if you breathe it in too quickly.
There's no season I don't love that lake, no time of day or night it doesn't tug at me to get as close to it as I can, to walk in it, swim in it, to lie down in it and be rocked by the waves.
I'm lucky to have two great friends who live on the shore, whose houses are open to me with no reservation required. So I can camp out, sit on their decks, walk the wild edges in winter, when the shore ice forms. I can watch the windsurfers, the bald eagles, the hummingbirds in summer. The coppery sunsets in the fall. And the migrators that hug the shore as they travel northward to Canada, starting in about...two weeks.
In the winter, on a good long cold one like this one's been, shore ice forms, great massive layers of sand and spume and solid green, massing on mass, a seasonal sedimentary history of storm and sun and calm and wind. It piles up and makes a solid surface on which you can walk hundreds of yards out from shore. And when you come near the edge, the torn and ragged water slaps upward at you, sucking from under, spraying, lifting toward your bare perch like the oily breach of a whale, dropping, to roll the ice balls under, building, dripping, tearing down. You can't help wondering how long you'd last if the edge gave way, if you fell twenty feet down into that opaque slush, how anyone would pull you out; how cold it would be, for how long.
The lake is greedy, taking swimmers and divers and boaters and fishers, all year long, the innocent and experienced alike. One moment of inattention, standing too close to the edge, swimming near the breakwaters, discovering there is an undertow, staying out on the lake in a sudden storm. But she's gentle, too, shallow water over deep sugar sand, warmed in the sun, a place of family frolic and teenage trysts. A full moon setting, Venus on her shoulder, a freighter on the horizon, a storm blowing in from the west...the air as fresh as it comes.
Any day you're bored, just look through the Grand Haven Beach cam, to see what the shoreline looks like now.
Kudos to josh and Tom, who guessed right: 33 is the number of homes I've lived in. Going to have to make it harder. Which of these is the correct statement?
- I have visited or lived in all but 4 U.S. states.
- I have attended 4 colleges.
- I have studied 4 languages.
- I have visited 4 foreign countries.