The Gift of Water
as seen in the Marquette Monthly December, 2018
By Linda Johnson
Dad drove the Chevy wagon right up onto the sandy bank where we first stepped out, Dad, Mother, we four kids, the dog. There lay Lake Superior, spread out like a dream—Heavenly!, Mother said in her native German. Across the decades, I can still see her on that day, standing in her green bathing suit, wind blowing her copper hair, Father’s arm wrapped around her. The two of them are watching us children in the water, but Mother’s gaze strays out across the lake, beyond.
That was the summer my brothers and I had spent cooling off in the backyard with buckets of water. It was the summer Dad quit drinking, and the summer when we would first see Superior. One evening when he came home from the Chevy plant, Mother was making liverwurst sandwiches with pickles. I’m not hungry, he had said, his back to her, walking outside to smoke. Mother had four children to care for all day in the heat, and she was tired, but mostly, I think, hurt. Father seemed not to appreciate all that she did. But that following Saturday morning, we packed for the camping trip that we all needed. We left the house first for the A&P, and Father pulled into the lot. Mother let him shop alone while she waited with us children and the dog in the wagon. Had they agreed that Father would shop alone, or was Mother still hurt? The dog was jumping excitedly, and then Dad came out pushing the filled grocery cart. Five foot nine in boots and army fatigues, he had served in both the Pacific and European theaters. His head had been split open by a grenade.
We had found a campsite and Dad spread out the tent. Let’s get this camp ship-shape, men! His only daughter, I and my brother John tunneled like moles into the musty canvas, searching for the center grommet—Got it! I shouted. John stood while I pushed the pole into the grommet. Sweaty, proud, we raised the roof in benediction of our camp, Dad pulling corners taut, pounding stakes with his axe.
The clothesline was strung up, the bed-rolls laid out—tasks Mother would have tended to, but I have no memory of that, or even of her cooking on that trip. Actually, Mother was like an Olympian warrior, strong, and a couple inches taller than Father. She had survived Hitler’s invasion into Austria, and now she ran our household. Has my memory diminished Mother, made her shorter than Father? Had the Lake really transformed us all?
The dog broke out running, barking up and down the beach, celebrating his freedom. We children shot like bullets into the lake, celebrating our happiness. Diving in and out, calling Marco Polo, we circled my little brother, our laughter dissipating from the water into the pines, tensions lifting from Mother, lifting from Father.
Dad waved us out, but I lingered as long as I could in the blessing, one more dive and then another and another off the big rock, and then I collected my pile of precious stones. I could see all the way down to the sand bottom to each bright stone before I even wrapped my hand around it. The water was so clear that I could drink it, and I did, quenching my thirst in that wonderful time of my life, like I own it forever.
We children were hungry again. Mother hadn’t brought her pumpernickel bread, her bucket of smoitz for frying potatoes—foods that kept us from being real Americans. Instead, Dad had packed our food. For two weeks we ate of the American dream that spills from the cornucopia—hotdogs, potato chips, Hershey bars, a whole watermelon kept cold in the lake of my dreams where I am baptized into citizenship.
We lived almost naked, in bathing suits. We dragged driftwood, carried stones for our fire ring, followed our father—god of my young dreams—along the huckleberry bank where he severed branches with his glinting knife, and then, victorious, we marched back to camp with our sharpened hotdog sticks. Dad struck a match to the balled-up newspaper, letting time fall away, while we played Indian rug-burn and Dad showed us how to throw a knife so it sticks in the sand. The last curl of burning-wood dropped into the heart of the fire, and Dad pushed a hotdog onto our sticks. In that radiance I slid mine, blackened, onto the bun. The sleepiness of the long day fell over me, Dad playing his harmonica, the dog at my feet, all of us swaddled in the good, strong smell of our American camp.
My mother is mostly absent from this page of my memory, but only because she had given the gift of their father to his children, handing him the reins, and he taking them. Together they worked beyond the pain of their individual and shared history, blessing our camp next to the Lake with their loving effort. Never would summer taste so good again.
WATER SAVER TIPS
Turn off the tap while brushing your teeth.
Do you need to flush every time?
Contributor’s note: Linda Johnson summers in Sault Ste. Marie with her extended family.
“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.
