Water's Edge

The edge of the water is the most extraordinary place.  The place of transition, where sand turns to water and water to sand, rough to smooth and smooth to rough, brown to blue and blue to brown, pebbles to liquid and liquid to pebbles.  The creatures who live there survive as if by magic, washed by small waves, disappearing into the sand, skittering along the edges, vanishing into shells, taking flight across the crest of the waves.  Tiny, graceful crabs and lumbering, awkward pelicans.  Beached starfish, lost jellies, waiting for the tide to roll back in.  Raucous laughing gulls, their coal-black heads glistening in the sun.   

 

I am a little girl, maybe six years old, and my younger brother and I are way, way out on the beach.  The tide is as low as I have ever seen it or ever will, even in another 45 years.  We squat in the sand, our toes sinking into its grainy softness, to play with our pink and blue plastic buckets and shovels.  The water, even a couple of hundred feet out, barely covers our feet, so that every tiny shell beneath us is visible.  The sun beats down on the damp hair plastered to my neck and tiny ripples of waves make occasional passes around our ankles.  It is a wild sensation, to be so far out on what seems like the edge of the world, placid ocean and turquoise sky melding into an arc of heaven on earth.

It is pitch black except for the stars; we are skinny-dipping in Lake Michigan off South Manitou Island.  A group of girls and their counselors, out for a three day trip on an isolated island, remnant of the last Ice Age.  We have been doing the usual -- hiking the forest, checking out a shipwreck, pitching tents, cooking over a fire, roasting s'mores -- but late at night we come running down to the beach to experience the world at its most elemental and free.    We are out to where we can just keep our heads above the water and the sky is huge and the lake is vast.  Utter abandonment.  

We are high in the mountains, backpacking Glacier National Park.  One of my hopes for this trip has been to see a dipper, a small, nondescript, grayish-brownish bird who makes its living by hiking upstream in seach of food in swiftly flowing waters.  I can hardly believe it when we accidentally come upon one.  A life bird in the starkest sense -- not only my first dipper but, quite likely, my only one.  Backpacking in Glacier is hard work, and unsettling, too -- we camped the first night beside a lake where human bones had been found the previous summer (the rest had become a meal for a grizzly).  The Montana/Alberta border is a place of astonishing magnificence, but it probably won't be one that we backpack with young children.  I will have to remember that little dipper at the edge of the stream for another 30 years without another sighting.

A crowd is gathered down the beach and my little sons emerge from its tangle, racing and laughing, eager to pull me back with them.  The early morning fishermen have dragged their boats and nets onto the shore and are busy tossing their fish into their trucks and their leavings back into the surf.  Flopping rays, tiny hammerhead sharks, a blowfish -- the children are enchanted by the treasures the sea spews forth.  They bring everything they find to show me, pose gleefully for the camera, and rush back to the water, trying to return as many lives as they can to the mystery of the ocean.  

 

I am all by myself, standing in the rivulet of water that runs from Lake Michigan into North Bar Lake.  Or does it run from North Bar into Lake Michigan?  An isolated place of perfection.  I could hardly believe that I found it last summer, after driving in erratic spirals around Empire, looking for spots where my family had spent some of our happiest days a few years earlier.   I had remembered an afternoon on a small lake that stretched between the dunes to the big one, an afternoon of sunshine and laughter and splashes.  By the time I found my way there again, an evening chill was settling across the water's edges and there was no one else to take it all in: sky, sunset, water.  

 

I'm not particular.  The edge of the water can be anywhere.  The water itself can be any kind.  Creek, stream, river, lake, sea, ocean.  They all bring mystery to the shore and carry dreams to the horizon.  The water's edge is my favorite place to be.