A perfect morning for running. Too bad I just ran 9 miles yesterday. Oh well. The only physical activity I’ve done today is picking up and bagging fallen branches in our front yard.
In terms of being outside, I’ve sat on the back deck for hours. Earlier, I watched a fox pause on my neighbor’s driveway to scratch an itch for almost 5 minutes. Then it slinked (slunk? slank) away. When I told Scott about it, his guess was fleas. This is not the first or second time I’ve seen this fox — slight, sleek, wild.
Even though I’m not running, I’ve decided to post some water things for future Sara:
tributaries / from Diane Setterfield
When I encountered this wonderful description near the beginning of Setterfield’s Once Upon a River many years ago, I knew I wanted to archive it. Finally, here it is:
from Housekeeping / Marilynne Robinson
I never finished reading Housekeeping (I should), but the descriptions of lake water in the opening pages has stuck with me for decades:
Sometimes in the spring the old lake will return. One will open a cellar door to wading boots floating tallowy soles up and planks and buckets bumping at the threshold, the stairway gone from sight after the second step. The earth will brin, the soil will become mud and then silty water, and the grass will stand in chill water to its tips. Our house was at the edge of town on a little hill, so we rarely had more than a black pool in our cellar, with a few skeletal insects skidding around on it. A narrow pond would form in the orchard, water clear as air covering grass and black leaves and fallen branches, all around it black leaves and drenched grass and fallen brances, and on it, slight as an image in an eye, sky, clouds, trees, our hovering faces and our cold hands.
Housekeeping / Marilynne Robinson
It is true that one is always aware of the lake in Fingerbone, or the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless waters below. When the ground is plowed in the spring, cut and laid open, what exhales from the furrows but that same, sharp, watery smell. The wind is watery, and all the pumps and creeks and ditches smell of water unalloyed by any other element. At the foundation is the old lake, which is smothered and nameless and altogether black. Then there is Fingerbone, the lake of charts and photographs, which is permeated by sunlight and sustains green life and innumerable fish, and in which one can look down in the shadow of a dock and see stony, earthy bottom, more or less as one sees dry ground. And above that, the lake that rises in the spring and turns the grass dark and coarse as reeds. And above that the water suspended in sunlight, sharp as the breath of an animal, which brims inside this circle of mountains.
Housekeeping / Marilynne Robinson
Alice Blanchard and the bottom of the lake
In this essay about mysteries involving murderous lakes, Blanchard describes her childhood experience of living beside a lake and the September the dam broke and the lake emptied:
The next day, my sisters and I hurried down the hill to see what was left of the lake. We couldn’t believe it—the whole thing was gone. Our little dock extended out into nothing. The drop was deep into water-speckled mud. The dock’s legs were covered in slime, and small fish splashed around the remaining puddles.
It was sunny out—a beautiful September day. We climbed down the wooden ladder onto the lake bottom, where the mudflats bore our weight like sandbars at the beach. Everywhere you looked, trash mucked the lake bottom—tar-colored fishing poles, plastic buckets, half-buried flip-flops, boards with rusty nails sticking out. Dead fish floated belly-up, while a few still-living fish twitched their fins and snapped their gills, trying to wriggle away into the deeper pools. Everything smelled rotten in the strong sun.
My sisters and I explored for hours. We found a wine bottle filled with mud, a weed-covered diving fin, a capsized rowboat, a crooked golf club, and more than a few rotten oars. I looked around for Rita’s body. My feverish imagination had convinced me that she would be there, half-buried in the mud, her long silky hair turned to seaweed, her waitress uniform the color of algae, her skeletal waist tied to a cement block by a length of water-logged rope. Needless to say, we didn’t find any dead bodies that day.
At the Cold, Still Bottom of the Lake / Alice Blanchard
Her description makes me think of “drown town” in the series I just read about Indian Lake. Earlier in the essay, Blanchard writes about being frightened by her inability to know what was below her as she swam. This unknowingness doesn’t bother me too much — often I even welcome it — but I have, especially this summer, thought about might be below me in lake nokomis. In the shallowest parts, near the beaches, men with metal detectors have claimed anything of value, but how many people know what (or who) dwells at the bottom in the middle of the lake?