Placename-indigenous
Lucerne-in-Maine
Morning Lake
When I returned to Maine, I began a slow process of reconnecting to the land, water and people I left behind. Pieces of this came together from three separate practices: rowing, swimming, and yoga.
I learned to row when I left Maine to attend university. I needed the muscular exertion, the time on the river, to keep muscles and heart in balance with the training of my mind. Now I row at dawn from a few weeks after the ice melts in April, to late october when ice begins to form at the edges of the beach. I row across the cove, then down to the isthmus. As I practice keeping my balance on the water in a boat that's less than a foot wide and 26 feet long, I keep my eyes on the hills, and trees and boulders on the horizon, and on the changes of the season. Some days there's a wind that skims over the water. Other days, it's rain or fog, or still water with a motorboat's wake. I feel all the changes in the water's energy. No day is ever like any other. The act of balancing is always a challenge.
Swimming in a lake is like a slow full-body tango. There is no place water will not touch, seep, flow. And unlike a pool, everything in the lake is alive and feels. My friend Vera told me there is a tremendous energy in deep water lakes, that a great spirit presides. To swim, is to open to this spirit, to feel muscle and energy and will dissolve at the boundary of skin and water. It is to feel, intensely, but without the usual burden of self-contained ego. When I swim, I belong to the water, and the water to me. When I swim, I am the lake, in one of its fluid forms.
I swim the first few strokes numb with cold, until a thin layer of warmth forms over my skin. I pass over a huge boulder that watches my approach, then the Namegos nests at mid-cove, then the deeper water of the far shore. Here, I greet the huge, garage-sized boulder I call Pahko. I pull myself up on the ledge along her steep side and whack her very hard to be sure she can hear me. She is a slow mover, slower than trees, slower than centuries. When I am near, I have to slow down. When she awakens, I speak, and then I lay my face against her rough cool side and listen. Sometimes she is quiet, other times tones resonate in my heart which I try to follow. The meanings are deeper that consciousness. I let them sink into my dreams. Pahko's twin looms beneath the water, I pass over him as I swim back across the cove. I have seen loon darting underwater here, shadows in the shadowed water.
Back on the dock, I dry off (especially if the air is still cool), then begin a Yoga Sun Salutation. I face east, spread my arms, lift my face to the sun, and breathe in. I gather the energy into my hands, then face them first away, into the cove, the trees, the rocks, the water, and then toward my heart. I greet what is before me and within me, and feel their connection. After this the mountain pose, then warrior, downward dog, cobra, mountain. With this ceremony I reclaim my body from the cove, like putting on my clothes, and I run up the path to make breakfast for my children.
It takes time to feel the tremendous energy of a deep water lake. And with each season the energy shifts. Iced over and white, its energy is bound and reflects huge quantities of light from sun or moon. In summer, it breathes in the sun's rays like air and teems with life, its surface ever changing. Between seasons as the ice forms or melts, the energy is scattered, local. In springtime after the thaw is when the entire cove resonates with released energy. Spring is lake monster time.
People of Scotland will swear by their Loch Nest monster, the people of Lucerne call theirs by different names. Anyone who swims in these waters, however, can feel the life energy in the water. One cloudy morning in May, shadows snaked over the cove as I swam, making it difficult to identify the usual underwater markers. When sight becomes unreliable other senses take over. Hearing and touch are only mildly effective underwater. But there's a different sense, one that picks up energy or vibration that kicks in. On this morning I could sense something that felt like life, something very large and powerful.
There isn't much you can do when you're halfway across the cove and this feeling comes over you, besides greeting this spirit. As a child I used to greet the cellar spirits the same way: the cement floor, the rumbling furnace, the piles of rags. Now, as an adult, I could pick up some of this vibration in the water. I swam aware, alert, ready for response.
The fish building their nests ignored me, as did the crows darting overhead from the tops of the white pines. The sun was still low, so the water darkened as I approached the deep opposite shore, shaded by the hill and the tall pines that grew by the shore. I approached Pahko slowly, passing over her submerged brother with a muscular nod. Suddenly, something black and swift shot post and curved around. Fish swim this quickly but are not nearly so large in this lake. I skipped my breathe and stopped swimming so I could keep staring at the passage between boulders where the shadow passed. It passed again, this time black except for a sudden flash of white.
As I turned up gasping for air I saw the loon emerge on the waters surface. It glanced my way, momentarily curious, then dove again and disappeared from sight. Loons are a familiar sight in the early morning when I row, they come out to greet the white and black racing shell like it's a relative, calling to each other with mild morning ululations. But I had never encountered one underwater where their power is dark and swift.
Any anthropologist would laugh at me and point out that the mysterious lake spirit is just a feeding loon. But I spend too many mornings out here on and in the water to believe that simple explanation. There are many spirits here, many mysteries, some subtle and fragile, others powerful as a howling wind moaning the pines. They are neither alien nor monstrous, neither supernatural nor evil. They are quotidian and normal as the miracles of birth and death, and as the dance that takes us from one to the other.