Uplake by Ana Maria Spagna

Author:Ana Maria Spagna
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2018-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

Away from Shore

AS A KID, I SWAM ALL SUMMER IN BACKYARD POOLS AND at the city park. Lessons in the morning, wildness all afternoon. My bare feet grew calluses, my hair turned brittle green, my shoulders got broad. In high school, I raced butterfly and breaststroke and returned home fit and famished to devour plates of fettuccine made with whole cream. In college: laps before dawn in the basement of an ivy-walled hall, followed by the morning’s first lecture, hair wet, and a clean notebook page. Then, in my early twenties, I moved to the woods.

There’s no pool here, no pool for miles. There is a beautiful lake, gorgeous, narrow, and long, cupped by rocky ridges like prayerful hands or the sides of a canoe. It’s a natural lake, carved a millennia ago by the long tongue of a glacier and raised twenty feet by a dam in the twenties. Even without the dam, it’s a deep lake, the third deepest in North America behind Crater Lake and Lake Tahoe, as you’ll hear via narration on the ferry, the Lady of the Lake, every single time you ride. It’s an astonishing shifting color: popsicle-blue or steamed spinach green or sometimes, in winter, on a cloud-dark day, an oily, ominous black. In summer, wind-whipped waves rimmed with sunlit glare move downlake in orderly formation as dry heat from the Columbia River draws cool air from the still snowy peaks—the lake is fed by twenty-seven glaciers. So, it’s gorgeous, yes, but it’s also very cold.

Leap from the dock on the hottest day of August, and you’ll emerge sputtering for air. You can’t stay in five minutes. Sometimes you can’t stay at all. At the Chelan end of the lake, fifty-five miles from here, it’s not nearly as bad, sixty degrees or even seventy, cool and refreshing. But at our end, closer to the mouth of the river, it can be twenty degrees cooler. Sometimes, often, I used to gaze out at the unswimmable expanse with abject longing. If only. If only.

Onshore, neighbors gather with inflatable toys and coolers of cold drinks, watermelon slices and half-soggy magazines. Kids somehow manage to stay in the frigid water longer, wading waist-deep, lining up like mergansers on the mossy logs, standing or sitting, sometimes shivering. Some neighbors, because of religion, don’t show skin; they splash about in dresses or jeans. Others don’t get wet at all but loll on the grass tossing sticks for dogs. The scene is inclusive, laid-back, and sometimes claustrophobic.

This is the small-town problem. You know everyone, and they know you. Even though they’re people you love—many of them, most of them—sometimes you want to get away. For that, you have miles, thousands of miles, of wilderness, but August in the backcountry is hot and dusty and buggy—so thick with flies, you can’t expose an inch of DEET-free skin—and sometimes you’re feeling too lazy to carry a pack. So, back to the lake.

I tried windsurfing for a few years—pulling up the sail over and over and falling in the water.

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