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I did not understand why I’d chosen Michigan, not at least on a cold-slighting night in one of the more inconsequential summers I’ve had. Part of it must be due to the Maryland humidity -- the land here once was a swamp and refuses to let anyone forget it. But anyhow.
Perhaps “choose” is too heroic. I tinker in silence. Michigan. What else was there but big sky and big sea?
And that ocean had not even been an ocean, just water so vast I could genuinely believe it was the end of ends.
In the final Narnia installment, Caspian or Eustace or some child or another rows through a vast field of shimmering liquid, not quite freshwater and salt-like only in its resemblance to a pristine tear. Its surface appears silver-pure, marred only by the oars and body of the quietly passing voyage. I am now aware that Narnia had been some long and pronounced metaphor about Christianity and death. But at times, here namely in Michigan, I cannot help but envision the all-encompassing sea through which the children embarked on their final journey.
There is an awe that comes with such grand and unashamed water that is truly religious.
Sitting at the foot of the dunes, I trusted the expanse ahead. It seemed simple to get up, brush the sand from my crevices, and walk across the lake into the after.
And I think that’s the crux of it — the after, by which I mean the before.
Big sky and big sea. I find that increasingly these two notions are actually one and refer to my desire to be swallowed by something greater. This greater environment is welcoming yet impartial. Neither dispassionate nor impersonal, it is unbothered by my intrusion because it understands one crucial thing: a splinter can also be read as a homecoming.
It would only make sense. After all, I must return to from what I come, in essence if not in earth.
I think frequently about the Sleeping Bear Dunes story. The legend, if I recall correctly, tells of the frantic escape of a mother bear and her two cubs from a fire. The family swims across Lake Michigan but only one makes it across. When the mother treads to shore, she is greeted by nothing. Her cubs succumbed to their exhaustion some time ago: perhaps only a paw's length away, perhaps already reaching soft silt, but nonetheless gone.
Mother Bear waited and waited until she became a protrusion on the bluff itself.
Clearly, this tale harnesses all my beloved themes against me: love, death, a reclamation by the earth, Mothers. All wrapped up neatly into a dream that once might have been real.
When I said earlier that I had chosen Michigan, I too wondered if that meant that I would build a home there or if it meant one day I would find myself scouring the Petoskey lakefront for respite. Or something else entirely. Still, when I drift into sticky slumber states away, I think of the way the firs drop into sky-sea and know that I must return all the same.
