The Gift of Water

as seen in the Marquette Monthly April, 2019
By Richard Hackler

I don’t usually remember my dreams. Lately, though, one has been sticking with me:

I’m alone on the beach, sitting with my legs folded in front of me. It’s early evening, the sky is dimming, and the water is rippling out to the horizon. This might be at McCarty’s Cove, or Park Point in Duluth. I’m not sure. Wherever I am, it’s clear I’m looking at Lake Superior, and what I’m doing is what I spent countless evenings doing during the twelve years I lived near the Lake: I’m looking out at the water until the sand cools under my thighs and the evening leaks from the sky. And then I begin sobbing (it is not a subtle dream). This is when I wake up.

In 2014, I moved to Minneapolis from Marquette, and I did this for a few good reasons. My family lives nearby, and my grandfather was nearing the end of his life. I needed to be here. Plus, I didn’t make very much money in Marquette, and my prospects of making more—or of staying at all solvent, really—seemed dim. And I’d caught the sense from my friends—most of whom I’d met in graduate school, and most of whom viewed Marquette as a 2-3 year stop on a journey towards something else—that to stay put is to stagnate, that one must leave and challenge oneself in order to Grow. Which sounded so sensible, and like the sort of plain truth I would regret not accepting if I didn’t accept it then. And so, early in May, I spent a long morning at McCarty’s Cove, saying goodbye to the lake, and then I drove to Minneapolis, where I am right now, sitting at my desk, looking out a window that faces a parking lot.

And I don’t regret it. Minneapolis has been lovely in so many ways. My parents are nearby. I met my fiancé here. And, aside from this, there is everything that a city provides: very good falafel and live music whenever I like and used bookstores everywhere. I teach at three different colleges, and I dart between them on a single speed bicycle, which injects a messy, headlong joy into my days. But while there is so much here to divert and delight me—Major League Baseball and protected bike lanes and punk shows in basements—I still miss the Lake every day. It’s difficult to imagine this ever changing.

I don’t know how to talk about why without reverting to cliché. I know that, after my sister died in 2009, I walked from my house to McCarty’s Cove almost every evening, and I would sit on the beach, listen to the lake breathe, and wait for my thoughts to slow and still. I know that doing so allowed me to function during the day at a passably normal level. I know that the lake—by virtue of its nearness and largeness and ubiquity—became for me both substance and spirit, a sort of living god: every day I would walk to the lake, I would bike near the lake, I would go to the grocery store and glimpse, from the parking lot, the lake—and the lake pulled me, over and over again, out of my head and set me, gasping, into the here and now.

The lake, then, was an alarm clock, and the lake was a daily reminder that, as essayist Annie Dillard had it, our lives here—and I mean your life and my life and anyone’s life, anywhere—are, in some elemental way, utterly terrifying and unfathomable, “a faint tracing on the surface of mystery”. Which seems, even as I write it, so uncosmopolitan, filled as my days are with things that are easy to understand: buses and freeway overpasses and bars that sell me “craft cocktails”. Sometimes I ride my bike to one of our lakes—Minneapolis is the City of Lakes, after all—but the lakes here are small and murky, and the parks surrounding them impeccably manicured. I’ve never sat by Lake Harriet and feared I might be merging with the divine. I recognize that this might be my fault: if there is such a thing as the divine, then it must be here, too. I hope I find it. Until I figure out how—until I can sharpen my gaze so that it locates the sacred pulsing behind even my blandest days—I’ll keep returning to Lake Superior. I’ll rent a car when I need to, I’ll drive to Marquette, I’ll sit by the water and be shocked back to my senses. And I’ll try to take it back with me, this knowledge, this way of seeing, this whatever-it-is. I’ll try to spend it slowly. I’ll try to make it last.

WATER TIPS

Fill your yard with native plants instead of lawn. Native plants are suited to their climate and require less water than grass.

Don’t throw out your water from boiling beans: the water is flavorful and works well as a base for soups.

Contributor’s note: Richard Hackler has lived in Duluth and Marquette. He teaches college English in Minneapolis.

“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.