Prompt #2: A Lake Demands Respect, Taking a Page from Annie Dillard.

After we unload the cars, say hello to the older relatives, and settle into our rooms, the first thing I do in Lake Chelan is jump right into the water. It’s usually quite a shock as the heat in the Inland Northwest during the summer easily can reach the triple digits and the water of the lake is melted glacier. It’s best to run into it and put your head under the surface, to not ease in. My cousins and I will toss around a football, wrestle, or have a splash fight. But the novelty wears off soon enough and they’re out after about an hour. I stay a little bit longer. When I was younger, I would stay in the water from noon until sunset—if that’s not intimacy with a landscape, I don’t know what is. Occasionally, I swim out to the anchored dock or try to balance myself on the breaker rocks. But mostly, I just stay in one place immensely content to just be in water. I like being near any kind of water. I notice when I’m not. I was born next to it. Saltwater runs in my veins and my long-term plans all involve being near to it.

This isn’t limited to just Lake Chelan. I do the same thing whenever I’m in Ocean Shores or Cannon Beach. I remember when my family went to Cabo San Lucas, I was content just to be in the ocean, rolling with the waves with a beer in hand. I’ll even do this in pools, but the smell of chlorine will usually take away from that feeling of serenity. I’ve never thought much about why I do that, I just know that I enjoy the sensation. Now, after some time in this course, it makes a little bit of sense.

Until our readings and discussions in this course, I’ve never really collected my thoughts on nature or honestly, even thought about it at all. There are lots of new concepts I’m still absorbing, but I think most important to this entry is my relationship, how I fit in with nature. As you can tell from my previous entries, taking my environment for granted and not giving ample time or space to be away from an urban environment are some of my problems. But in retrospect, it’s pretty clear that I learned my place in nature, my respect for it, by water.

Despite my profound and lovely memories, Lake Chelan was also the first time I realized how very small I was. Chelan is a Salish Indian word for “deep water” and it really lives up to its name. Chelan, with a maximum depth of 1,486 feet makes it the third deepest freshwater lake in the United States, twenty-ninth in the world. A couple miles up the lake, the water turns into deep, cobalt blue not unlike an ocean. To this day, when we take my cousin’s boat out, I’m still afraid to open my eyes when I’m under the deeper water and unable to take the quietness that comes with being submerged and looking downward into, for a lack of better phrasing, that blue darkness.

We often talk and read about man and the subjugation of nature. I’ve seen trees cut down, animals being hunted, but our control over water, maybe because of a lifetime of going to this deep lake, isn’t exactly what I’d call dominion. Even as my concern grows for my once secret lake, you can see that further past where the deep water begins, the mountains become taller and steep. It’s as if the woods are taking back the lake from the desert in a fury. The wind tunnels so hard in the sudden valley that it can bring about whitecaps on a narrow lake.

The first time I almost drowned was in Lake Chelan. When I was about eighteen, my cousins and I were playing near Chelan Falls, where the lake flows out into the tributary of the Columbia. Most of the area is calm, quiet, with children splashing around and the state is smart enough to mark and but buoys around the dangerous outflow. Eighteen-year-old boys aren’t so smart. It’s an unsettling feeling to be carried away without your consent, suddenly swimming against a current. I was lucky enough to be close to a rocky edge with dry gripping where I could slowly climb sideways back to the calmer section.

Lake Chelan is where I learned to accept things as being natural, without inherent cruelty. Lake Chelan can be a place where I can peacefully drift for hours. Lake Chelan can also terrify and kill me. But it’s really about how I view and interact with the water, above all else, that creates the outcome—I get exactly what I put into it. It’s strange how I can understand a lake as a natural thing, but still don’t realize other people are other people, human beings.