Stripping the socks from my feet and stepping carefully over big rocks, I would run into Lake Michigan, taking long strides through the shallows until the water was too heavy and I finally collapsed into the waves, letting them wrap around me. I would hold still while sinking slowly under water, hit the sand, feel the cold set in and then burst back up to the surface to breathe. I’d kick around a little bit and it was the very best feeling, the water cradling my tired limbs after cross country practice.
This was a routine; my teammates and I would run through downtown then jump in the bay to celebrate the workout’s end, and my coach would shout from the shore that I was a fish after it took me too long to get out. I thought I wouldn’t mind that fate — belonging to the lake.
While my physical form isn’t something I find myself ruminating on (that particular identity crisis would perhaps belong in some sort of poetry or fiction), I appreciate my body as a vessel, something that permits me to experience and engage with the water — and everything else in my environment, for that matter. Clearly, I can’t live in a lake, but I can call it home in another way. Maybe the water is more meaningful as a place to return to rather than live.
At times, it seemed like the very lives of the locals revolved around waiting for the days that could be spent splashing along the shoreline — waiting for the sheets of ice reaching out from the beach to split and expose the water below on each winter’s day. In the placid north, where towns are separated by winding roads that are barren, save for deer and old evergreens, the Great Lakes pull everyone together. Being there, the privilege that it was, meant growing up in the water, learning to swim and, shortly after, learning to sail, flocking to the waterfront for peace or for friendship or just to see the stars.
The water is central to my community, something loved with a sort of ferocity. When I’m at home, I habitually check the wind forecast for days with a strong south wind — days when the waves will be good enough to go surfing. On those precious days, I drive out to the beach, passing other cars with fins protruding from the roofs, surfboards and paddle boards strapped on tight.
From the shore, I can see familiar faces bobbing around out where it’s deep, paddling back and forth to find the break. The lake is usually pretty choppy out there (I am cautioned by onlookers as I trudge through the sand, leaning with the strain of carrying my board) and I’m not the most skilled; for the most part, I end up getting tossed around by the water, sandy bottom to surface again and again, wave after wave. Each moment of it is meditative.
Soon it’s dusk and Lake Michigan laps at my ankles, my mom in the distance still scouring the wet sand for Petoskey stones before it gets too dark to see them. Skipped stones sink out of sight, torn from their sandy homes by children’s hands. The shoreline is marred with footprints, big and small. The sun meets the horizon and I’m making my way back up the beach, peeling off a sticky wetsuit, shouting goodbye.
It was on misty mornings in the summertime that the lake and I would occasionally reunite. Surfers from near and far huddled together on the shore, the steep sand dunes within sight and above us a gray sky that seemed infinite, daylight pawing at the clouds. My cousins and I gathered with others to participate in a rescue project, which was there early to provide our group with water safety training. In this instance, each of the people who assembled on the beach had taken the initiative to learn how to use their familiarity with the lakes to help anyone struggling in the water.
At first, the lot of us on the beach that day were strangers, brought to each other by caring for the local community and a deep-rooted connection to the water. After a couple hours of practicing rescue techniques, we’d had plenty of time to mingle and discuss where we came from and where we wanted to go. While taking turns dragging each other out of the lake, I listened to a guy talk about the biggest waves he’d surfed in Ireland. Before parting ways we were all arm in arm, certain we’d meet again on the water someday.
This same comradery lasts year-round, even with the temper of the seasons, when snow is falling and icy gusts lash at anyone standing on the shore. I can envision my cousin’s face with big chunks of ice clinging to his beard, his cheeks a fiery red from the cold, fluttering eyelashes bright white with frost. A little family-owned surf shop on the street near the lakeshore acts as a monument, appearing just around the corner from the beach — its familiar colors welcoming those that approach.
I would hesitate to call many things ugly, but nothing kinder comes to mind when I think of corporations threatening to damage this bountiful landscape and all the experiences that come along with it. Recently, the Michigan Public Service Commission granted Enbridge Energy a permit to build a tunnel in the Straits of Mackinac around the Line 5 pipeline, an approval which means to perpetuate the pipeline by bringing the tunnel project much closer to fruition.
Investing in this project would mean a continued dependence on fossil fuel energy sources, which is a step back from preserving the bodies of fresh water so many rely on. There are different sides to everything, but I’ve grown up to understand aging Line 5 as a potential devastation to the Great Lakes and their dependents. For years, shutting down the pipeline has been a matter of debate, and the tunnel now looms as a prospect that would disturb the land and earth that comprise many communities, putting ecosystems and sacred shorelines at risk. An inadvertent oil spill from the tunnel in one of the Great Lakes would be catastrophic, and the development of big energy infrastructure would strain the homes and habitats of land and water alike. It doesn’t take a serious conservationist to find the project reprehensible, only someone unsettled by the possibility of facing years spent trying to restore and rehabilitate what was once untainted.
Anyway, this sort of thing tends to weave its way into many bits of my memory, as it poses a threat to each of them. Now, I think of sitting on a slanted rock, the cliffs of Pictured Rocks above, the water below extra dark because of their shadow, and I dig my heels and fingertips into any edges I can find to hold on and be able to look out at the stirring lake. Goosebumps decorate my body, whispers from the breeze, so down I go, sliding into Lake Superior. It is late enough in the season and the water is brisk, but not quite cold enough to take my breath away. Swimming down a ways, I see little caves carved into the cliffs, big enough to swim through, with layers of striped rock opening out. I keep letting my head dip down beneath the surface, seeking the renewal of breaking through the top again, the day greeting my face. Up against the cliffs, the water laps gently, constantly, a beating to the rhythm of my heart.
I can only hope that the traditions and adventures buried deep within the water will be as prominent in the future as they always have been; maybe things will be okay. Maybe, years from now, the shores will still be clean and people will be taking their boards out into the waves of Lake Michigan just the same, jumping off docks on Mackinac Island, sending ripples far out into the great blue body that catches them when they land.
For now, home is still cherished home. But time marches on ever and ever, and the way things are now is endangered by the future and by ambition. I can’t imagine the place I was raised without the same trees, the beaches or the indomitable Great Lakes. I want to believe — need to believe — that the wonderland of my home will last for lifetimes to come.
Statement Columnist Evelyn Brodeur can be reached at enbrod@umich.edu.