The Gift of Water

Water-Saving Tips

as seen in the Marquette Monthly January, 2019
By Lisa Fay Coutley

#1—Let the waves take you.

My students always want to know how to make language do what they want it to do, so I tell them that as a girl I spent my days running barefoot on the shore of a Lake Michigan bay, making forts and skipping rocks and learning life by the bloated bellies of dead carp. Secrets bloomed inside them, changing their bodies forever. The water that once held them left them there and refused to take them back until they surrendered to the rocks and sun and bugs. The same waves that became part of their bones became part of mine until I no longer heard water, but the waves moved inside me.

Still I was always scared of the lake I loved. Its surface was dark as a closed door. I’d open my eyes underwater and see galaxies of green glowing in the sun. I’d sit cross-legged on sand bars and bury myself to my waist in mud. I’d cartwheel the length of our shore for hours. Though no matter how many summer days I spent in my wet suit, I never swam over my head, and I never swam after dark.

My dad could swim, ski, and drive a jet boat, yet my mother never learned to swim. I could hardly tread. I nearly drowned in swimming lessons once. My teacher dove into the shallow end to save me and then warned the class about the dangers of diving into the shallow end. My lessons ended when my parents divorced. Dad never taught me. Instead, he’d carry me on his back when the water was deep or I was scared. All my life I lived on lakes and never learned to enter deep water without panic.

The first time I jumped into Lake Superior, during my first year of graduate school at NMU, it took me twenty minutes to fall into her darkness off the northern edge of Little Presque. I no sooner penciled into the water than shot back out. You looked like you were ascending, a friend laughed, but in terror. I never felt so alive. Like my first lake, I knew her waves could save me or take me at anytime.

#2—Let your lake save you.

When we were little, my sister and I planted trees in our yard. Hers grew like a regular tree, I thought, tall and messy against the garage she helped Dad build before I was born. I chose a Japanese Elm, its ashen bark so different from our cottonwoods and evergreens, and when Dad asked where I wanted her, I said as close to the water (as far from the house) as possible, where Dad said there was flat beach and tall grass when he was a boy, before the city built the dike after the flood of ’73. Each year my tree grew more crooked, leaning against the north-shore wind, reaching toward the water.

Our home was a humble but sturdy structure my grandparents built in 1948, on Lakeside Place, on two lots of waterfront property. They raised my dad and his three brothers there. My parents raised my sister and me there. My sons spent a great deal of their young lives there. It was the Coutley hub, where we had holiday gatherings and bonfires and birthday parties and drank and fought and bled.

I grew up in a violent home in an idyllic place—lake water in front, a Wildlife Sanctuary behind, a neighborhood park two blocks down the alley, Bay Beach Amusement Park a half mile to the east, UW-Green Bay two miles down shore to the west—and its beauty bloomed inside me and buoyed me before every angry secret fighting inside me could devour me from the inside out.

I always tell my students, writing saved my life, but lakes saved me first. Lake Michigan gave me stillness inside a family storm. Lake Superior made me face myself, all my fear. She showed me when to tread and when to float. To breathe. To trust. To jump. To let go but keeping going forward.

When my students want to know how to make their writing do their bidding, I tell them what lakes told me—surrender, absorb, be guided by sound and rhythm, be driven by discovery, joy, and hope, and have faith in a process and a body that can tumble smooth what was once broken and rough.

Contributor’s note: Lisa Fay Coutley grew up in Green Bay and earned an MFA in Poetry at Northern Michigan University. She teaches at the University of Nebraska—Omaha and is the author of tether, Errata, and In the Carnival of Breathing.

“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.