Uplifted
as seen in the Marquette Monthly December, 2019
By Claudia Drosen
“Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.”
—Wallace Stevens
It seems like eons ago that I attended elementary school at P.S. 222 in Brooklyn, New York. However, the memory of a class clown named Jeffrey S., who signed my 6th grade autograph book upon our graduation a handful of decades ago with his version of a poetic aphorism, has stayed with me as if he had written it last Tuesday. “Hey, Claudia” the entry began. “Roses are red, violets are blue, I like peanut butter, can you swim?” He had no idea, nor would he have paid any mind to my responses, but I still feel a mixture of comic relief and more serious introspection when I consider his words on that mint green page. When cleaning out closets over the years, I revisited this zippered book, mumbling answers not to him but to myself: “I, too, like peanut butter, and no, I cannot swim.”
That being confessed, I’d like to share what spending lots of time on earth has taught me about this liquid conundrum: swimming is but one way to experience the water, and although I imagine it to be wonderful, I don’t fret that my non-participation in the backstroke means that I take insufficient advantage of this nourishing resource. The truth is that I harbor a spiritual need to be proximate to bodies of water. I treasure them, and I always have. When close to even the tiny stream that runs under a bridge as I walk near my home, I not only fill with great joy and well-being, but sometimes it’s more—a sense of rightness that almost feels tied to morality. I need these waters to live a proper authentic life. It would be wrong not to partner with them. They complete me.
When I was small, Sunday afternoons were reserved for family drives to Coney Island, where the water was just under our feet. We clomped across the wooden Boardwalk that runs along the Atlantic Ocean, separating the amusement areas from the beach. The cotton candy and paper cones of hot peanuts were good, but aaaahhh the water! It belonged there, and I to it. When family summer vacations finally arrived, we took our filled-to-the-gills Volkswagen Bug to the coast of Maine to escape the congestion of the big city. There my brother and I would spend ages on the rocks, searching tidepools for starfish, digging in the wet dirt for clams, popping kelp with our fingers, inhaling the odor of the mudflats. The open water was where we played and dreamed until our parents made us go anywhere else.
In 1986, my husband’s professorship at NMU brought us and our then young daughter, to Marquette, Michigan, on the South shore of Lake Superior. A few years later our son was born—the only true Yooper in the family. At first, having never been above the Bridge, I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of a lake so huge that wasn’t an ocean. Soon, I fell under her spell, and the notion that she was “only a lake” was forever put to rest. Mom Superior turned out to be so much more: an entity whose changes are as powerful as a person’s moods. And I learned that my own moods remained more in balance because of our co-existence.
On my daily journeys to town, viewing the lake schools me on the attitude of the day. She sometimes shows off a slick wardrobe of gun-metal grey at 9:00 a.m., then turns a churning navy blue by noon. In February, when eyed from above, she appears frozen to her depths, shores frosted by ice-laden trees that rival delicate diamonds. But when whipped by a gale stiff enough to break the surface tension, she offers a peek at her frigid but still roiling underbelly.
No, I haven’t gone swimming in Lake Superior, or in any other waters with which I’ve had the good fortune to share the planet, but the waters have nonetheless lifted me up in countless ways. By their side I am anchored to the earth, completely at home. Their loud, placid, nasty, unrelenting, welcoming, daunting temperaments have inspired reverence in me. No immersion required.
WATER-SAVING TIPS
When cleaning out fish tanks, give the nutrient-rich water to your nonedible plants.
Don’t let the faucet run while you clean vegetables. Rinse them in a filled sink or pan and then use this water for your garden or house plants.
Contributor’s note: Claudia Drosen is a flute instructor in the Music Dept. at NMU and principal flutist in the Marquette Symphony; she is also a poet and a lover of the songs the waters sing to her.
“The Gift of Water” columns are offered by the Northern Great Lakes Water Stewards and the Cedar Tree Institute, joined in an interfaith effort to help preserve, protect, and sanctify the waters of the Upper Peninsula.
