The Myth of Home

This lake believes it is the ocean. It speaks the same language—a tongue like wind, the only word an unceasing sibilance. Ring-billed gulls search for arthropods and fish, wings bent earthward at the wrists like paper airplanes made by smart boys. Their calls split the air, which smells cleanly of decay, brackish without the salt. Low, white-capped waves of varying lengths in multiple rows strike shore like strings of Morse code. It isn’t only the water that is unreadable. The sky scours the land for some kind of text, but the beach is covered in a sheet of sun-bleached Cladophora, algae woven by waves into one giant page. All it gives is confirmation of the rules in a childhood game: Paper covers rock, it says.

This is Lake Michigan. A crowded cedar forest, bark the color of kiwi skin shredding in long strips, opens to white dolomite bluffs. The only garbage, deflated party balloons—their once-bold foil colors now weather-muted—dot the cliff bottom. Happy Anniversary! they say to some distant individual. A chair that seems to have made its own self—legs, seat, arms, and back composed of the same angular white stones as the bluff—secures the shore.

I descend the accidental steps from our campsite, here at Wisconsin’s Rock Island State Park, following my husband. Like a single animal we track along the shore; I, the hind legs, place my boots in exactly the spots his feet have just risen from. Suddenly it seems as if the mud-brown strap of his sandal has jumped off and is slithering toward the water. “Snake!” I yell. For a moment, mid-step, he straddles the animal, which has spun around to face us. Then with a high arc he safely rejoins his feet and turns to observe. The snake is a northern water snake, not an unusual inhabitant for a lake, but a stranger to the ocean. Yet even the snake seems to be part of the ruse. His brown banding is barely visible, as if he is trying to camouflage himself within himself. He has curled into the infinity symbol. I want to believe what the snake says, that this water goes on forever, but I have learned to see the snake as a warning.

The first time I camped along a Great Lakes shoreline was in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. From sandstone cliffs I stared down two hundred feet at water the green of oxidized copper. Lakebottom stones, their size diminished by distance, stared back at me through the deeply transparent water like coins in a shopping mall fountain. Water spilled through narrow nooks in the cliff tops and fell in powerful, gradually widening streams directly into Lake Superior as in the introduction to the ’80s TV show Fantasy Island. When I sent pictures and wrote about the trip to friends and family, I mistakenly called the place “Pictured Rocks National Seashore.” Where is this seashore? my friends asked. Oops—lakeshore, I retyped. I couldn’t help feeling like it was a downgrade. But more than that, I was surprised at the ease with which I, an east-coaster, had made the error.

What would it be like to meet this lake on its own terms, having traveled no more than to and from its own shores—oceans, at best, a distant mythos? I wish to be indigenous to every place I visit, to see it as earth entire. How nice it would be to shed the compulsion to compare one landscape to another, to analyze, evaluate. To simply hear what the land says. To no longer have to choose, or love or hate, to let down my guard and feel the power of the sea in this Great Lake.

I was not born of the ocean. The sea was more great-aunt than mother. Her strange manners—the continuous roar of her voice, how she would grab hold and pull me wherever she was going—always left me a little afraid. But during my once yearly visits...