Once More to the Lake

On summer

For many people, the new year starts in January; for the Church, it starts in November, with Advent; for me, it starts in June. It always has; since my life first began in summer, it’s kept on beginning over and over anew as the season returns. As the summer unfolds, I unfold with it, discovering a new self for the next three months, and when fall comes, I spend the rest of the year living out of the memory of who I was in the sun and heat.

As I feel the old year ending and my new one quicken, I begin to crave secrecy. I can only discover this new self alone; she refuses to find me; I have to go and meet her. So I take to driving out on my own, into unfamiliar places, looking for some Faulknerian haunt: a shroud of trees, a lake ensconced by hills, a small town where I will neither recognize nor be recognized by anyone. A couple weeks ago, I drove out on one such quest. I threw a journal in a backpack to bring with me, hoping to find a small diner in the middle of nowhere, order a cup of coffee, and work on my novel. But first, I drove out to the lake.

Even in high school, when I felt stuck in my hometown and only wanted to get out, I loved the lake. There is no magic like a body of water in the summer, whether a river or a swimming pool or a lake. When I was a kid, growing up in Texas, my parents sometimes took us to a spring-fed swimming hole. The water there was almost too cold to bear; if, like I, you hated the feeling of jumping in all at once, you had to inch in piece by piece, as the water stung your ankles, then your legs, and then began to tug at your swim shorts, until you stood waist deep in ice, afraid to plunge in further. Trees hung over the water, scattering shadows, and beneath my bare feet, I could feel the slimy rocks. An oak tree grew on the bank, and its branches reached down into the water and formed a tunnel of sunless roots, through which my brother and our friends would swim. I never did; I was afraid of getting stuck and losing myself.

It is this cthonic feeling that makes me seek deep water in the hottest months. Not some practical wish—because it’s hot and I’d like to swim—but this, the memory of cold water wrapped around my waist and the fear of swimming too deep. A child’s fear, but something about the image strikes me now. Rilke once said, “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.” Perhaps we might say: the purpose of life is to dive into deeper and deeper places.

Along the shore of the lake, I slip my shoes off and walk along the sand, which slides underfoot and refuses to form a solid path. Smooth black rocks inlay the beach, glinting like cast-off scales, as if Leviathan has been rubbing its shoulders along the foundations of the old bridge and shedding stones for the waves to carry to the land. At the edge of the water, the sand darkens and hardens beneath my toes. I step into the lake and feel it curl around my feet. The water is cold. For a while, I walk like this, kicking droplets into the air, leaving flat footprints which press, then sink, into the sand as the water sucks away all traces of the past.

Sometimes you can see eagles at the lake. If you are out walking at the right time, you can watch them cut over the treetops, draw a geometer’s round in the blue sky, then drop—slash—rise, now soaring away from the lake, fish in claws. I see no eagles today. The fishermen are all human, with families or alone, flanked by beer coolers and lawn chairs, their lines a tether between man and lake.

A line from Donne flashes into mind: “Go and catch a falling star.” What more fitting command for summer? Catch a falling star. Better yet, catch a firework. Catch a lake and the Leviathan that plays, unseen, within it. Catch the fireflies that rise in sparkling fleets above the darkened cornfields. “Catch” is a good word for how we live life. We don’t “make” it, or “cause” it, or wish it into existence; it falls out of the sky on top of us, and, if we are watchful, we catch it. Or, perhaps, it’s the other kind of catch, the kind that comes in a hard game of tag played in the backyard at dusk—the kind you have to chase.

“I am out with lanterns, looking for myself,” Emily Dickinson once wrote. I am out, not with a lantern, but with a firefly jar. (“Go and catch a falling star,” Donne said. A jar of fireflies comes close.)

I walk beside the lake for a while and watch the cottonwood fluff as it drifts through the golden light and catches in the grass. (There it is again, things lifted, changed, then caught.) By the time I leave, my shoulders are hot from wearing the burning sunlight, and sweat slicks down the baby hairs at the top of my neck. I crank the air conditioning in the car and drive. In the next town over, the diner is closed; in fact, everything is closed; I have forgotten that it’s Sunday. So instead of writing, I drive, and drive, threading my way through small highways and in and out of towns. I am out looking for myself; perhaps if I drive just a little faster, I’ll find her at the next bend, walking through the tawny grass along the road. What diving grounds has she discovered? Can she “tell me where all past years are”? They are buried beneath the lake, washed away like my footprints, tossed with the stones and slowly coated with the growth of watery weeds. And yet they are here too, called back with each successive summer: old self, new self, this diving into deeper and deeper places that is the slow and constant turn of time. I think I’m catching up to who I need to be. But next summer, the turn begins again. Catching life is so much like catching falling stars; both burn and vanish between your fingers. So I keep coming back, to the lake and to the quest, to wade into the cold water and wait for some call. Come next summer, you’ll find me here, listening.

The title of this piece is taken from E. B. White’s essay, “Once More to the Lake.”