Just an hour or so away is Lake Michigan. To the East of that, is the much shallower Lake Erie. Some winters it will freeze clear across, with great masses of ice that look like frozen waves, piled up against the shores. Work has taken me over there more than once, and when my day was done, I loved to sit on one of the benches at water's edge, bundled up against the cold, watching the earth slope to the water, the wind against my face, a caress of cold, slow and pale.
I was there in Spring last year, when winter drew to a close, shadows stirred, and the seasons shifted. Another winter, away from the skies, those precious evenings aloft a memory, bought in by the elements, herded inside like a recalcitrant horse to a dark barn. A winter's routine of chilled mornings and dark nights, cold absolution for the time I'd spent out in the sun in months past. As I sat with the sound of breaking ice heralding the new arrival of Spring, I thought again of how quickly another season had flown away, time and tide waiting for no one. I thought of words I wish I'd been able to say to a friend the last time I was there, not knowing he would be gone from this earth when I returned.
Someone close to me asked why I was fascinated with the science of bones. I didn't answer him at the time, but I will now. I have studied bones untouched by anything but time. I have studied bones in fragments, co mingled with hundreds of others, burned and broken and laid bare to the elements. Still, I am always fascinated by the strength of that which is unfleshed. They are what lies at the center of us, not the heart, but that part of us that is the last thing to ever be dissolved, even if cut or disassembled or burned. It is the hardest, strongest most unwavering part of us, that which supports us, the last piece of us that remains of this earth, when everything else is lost. It's the surviving remnant of all that was dear to us.
Certainly some of my adventures would indicate that I too subscribed to such moments. But with adulthood, not only comes responsibility, but awareness. Suddenly, for myriads of reasons, aging, fear, illness, the evil intent of man, the people around you, as reliable as the sunrise, can, without warning, leave you. In their absence the sound of their goodbyes resonates in the emptying heart of your soul. You hear it always, but you do not respond to that fading sound, for to do so would be to admit to your own mortality.
But I hear the echo. I see it in the shape and form of things broken past integrity. I see it in a stormy sky, as lightning stains the dark, cold air shaping cold earth in cold darkness. I see it walking the landscape as the earth warms anew, the sky, blind and warm upon me, touching my skin, my form a wet seed growing wild in the cold dark earth.
That last night on Lake Erie, I heard it in the cold breath of a beautiful woman who was also sitting down by the water on a bench close by me. She was wearing a thick hat that covered what appeared to be a bald head. With an ethereal face, skin drawn pale and tight across pronounced cheekbones, she sat motionless in an expensive coat, not reading, not doing anything more than I. She simply sat there in that complete silence in which one does not need to be a doctor to see the translucent, drawn quality of her skin and the accepting gaze outward, in which she probably listened to the precious beat of her heart fueling the irreparable decline of her body. She sat still, seemingly frozen, sitting with a sense of purpose or at least some imprecise hope.I moved to a break wall about 20 yards away, to give her some privacy while we stared out at the lake. From a distance it looked deceptively flat, as if you could walk on it. If you looked out beyond, you can see the motion as the ice breaks up and if you listened closely you could almost hear a faint sub-aquean rumble as chunks of it break off as the movement of waves reclaiming their space disturb the quiet. So much that rumbles underneath the surface of a seemingly calm life, heard only by some.
What is it about the water that draws us? I remember as a kid we'd spend summers out West at my Uncle Glen's almond orchard in California and we'd swim in the irrigation ditches, riding the rushing flood of water that came sluicing down, the water moving fast, grabbing our shorts and pulling us down and forward. Not so deep and fast to as to be overly dangerous for a good swimmer, but enough so that as a kid, for a moment, you were part of something wild, wet and unstoppable, something so much bigger than you.
Even as kids,we weren't obvious to the danger, any more than I was unaware that the waters of this lake I sat on that night were without danger. I'd been out enough in a small fishing boat, to know that the waters, like the sky, hold their own dangers. Pilots of land or sky, we are always aware.For you never know when things will turn bad. Even though now the sky is pure and the temperature is warm, the fact that Spring is here is simply another sleight of hand from the greatest of magicians, Mother Nature. Winter never truly ceases, it only hides, Machiavellian stroke on the part of that foe, a new battle towards which it channels ancient wounds, inflicting its grievance upon the land. It will likely arrive to do battle when you least expect it, when the prolonged blow of the dark and ice sinks through the skull and lays its claim deep on the bones of the winter landscape. In only moments it can turn from the colorful quiet of new hope to a night not safe for man nor beast.
There's always a risk. As much as I love to fly, I have spent enough hours aloft to know that the heavens are a two edged blade, one of joy and one of violence, that can cut you clean from the sky without a moment's hesitation. I think about that now, alone and cold on the edge of a vast field of crashing ice as an osprey dives down for prey, his talons glinting in the last scrap of daylight.While this stranger and I sat out there, alone and together, the rest of the community stays home and warm, basking in the illusion that they were safe. Maybe illusion is really all they have. I'd rather be out here, facing the cold and the crashing ice, facing life. As a country on a warm September day over 10 years ago, we learned the danger of what living with an illusion can do. Yesterday, in Boston, we were reminded yet again, evil not being the form of a weapon, which can be crafted of the simplest things, but the intent.
On that March day, the stranger and I sat there, both wondering the same things perhaps. What would life bring us in the coming year, bracing renewal, or an end to our dreams? Would we be here this time next year to witness the ice break up? And if we were, would we even be the same person? Heraclitus is the Greek philosopher who once said essentially that you can't step into the same body of water twice. Maybe it was the same river twice, I didn't recall the exact quote but I do remember he said that just as the water "is not the same, and is, so I am as I am not." Time and tide shape us, strengthening or eroding, we learn to stand hard and look at everything that approaches.I thought of saying something to her, words of comfort, words of hope, but they dangle from my lips like spiders from a barn beam, held by only fragile threads of thought, twisting in the breeze. So many times, I'm left to offer words, of sympathy, of closure, or reason, and find that the words are just a shape to fill the abyss. She looked at me for just a moment, as if sensing I was going to say something. But I don't. My mouth and jaw grow taut with words, unable to let go and say what I want to. I simply nodded at her and turned away, and she nodded as if in acknowledgement.
The high, disinterested sky was darkening and it was time to head back to my hotel. But I hesitated. Winter faded as darkness ascended, a great chunk of ice tore free, as water reclaimed yet another area, sending seagulls into the air with an alarm. The woman did not look at me as I stood to go, but looked at the water, like myself, reluctant to leave.
A year later, I think to that night, wondering if she was there to stand at this Springs thaw. I think of the last 36 hours, the hours past, the torrent, the hours ahead, the hard and unyielding shore. I think of the tragic mute bones that could have withstood anything that life threw their way, if only left upright and undisturbed. Tears splash down, as water splashes onto rocks, filling that void so secret and dark, waters reclaiming our world.
