Mother water

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I recently met an old friend for lunch at a place on the far west side of Manitowoc. I can’t be that close to my home water—Lake Michigan—without paying a visit. The attraction is like gravity. I drove the two miles through town and turned onto the scenic boulevard that runs atop the bluff between Lincoln High School and the University of Wisconsin campus. On that chilly, cloudy early afternoon, a light mist speckled the windshield.

The lake stretched out before me, no waves and no whitecaps, just a steel-gray matte surface of ripples stirred by a breeze. It strikes me always, on visiting the lake again, how much I took it for granted, as a kid in the town half a dozen miles north along this same shoreline. Didn’t everyone hear the deep bass notes of foghorn on some dove-gray summer mornings? Who wasn’t able to ride a bicycle a couple dozen blocks and draw up beside a wide sand beach, whitecaps crashing on the sandbars just off shore?

Who didn’t build castles with sand-squiggle towers just above the slope where spent waves slid up on the sand? Who wasn’t familiar with the shrill cries of ragtag gulls circling above the pier, or the terns cruising past, their feathers perfect, their wings beating in near-military precision? I left this place, this lake, for college, and then work life, in the dry land of Milwaukee’s western exurbs. My parents also moved away, to a smaller inland town, my mom having tired of the cool lake winds that brought a misty chill to summer evenings.

I discovered how much I missed it after a couple of business trips and visits to high school friends brought me back to the lakeshore. I moved with my wife and two kids back to the area for about 15 years, after which we departed for a home on the Northwoods lake Noelle and I now call home. During family vacations while growing up, I’d fallen hard for the smaller, tamers, inland lakes, wild and scenic in their own way. I came to treasure them for their woodland scenery, their warmer and friendlier waters, their accessibility for fishing, ice skating, and other pursuits.

Lake Michigan, for all its allure, can push a person away with its icy water, its storms, its cold, penetrating winds, its sheer size. I’ve noticed over the years how often homes built just above the beach north of my hometown change ownership. The pleasures of watching sunrises, of campfires in the dunes, of falling asleep to the white noise of breaking waves, are eventually outweighed by the maddeningly late spring and summer warmth, the fog, and dampness in the air that no dehumidifier seems able to extract from inside the house. So for my life on water, I chose the northern glacial lakes. They’re like good friends, brothers, relatives, comfortable to be around. Lake Michigan, on the other hand, is like a mother, my source, a being I will always love, but from whom, inevitably, I had to take leave.