The Lake
by Peter Heller
Sloan’s Lake
I live on a lake on the west side of Denver. Sloan’s. Three miles around with an island in the middle. I live in a small 1950s blond-brick ranch house whose walls are cracking because the water table is high and there is a stream running through my crawl space. But I wouldn’t trade it. I look out the window and I see grass, water, trees, mountains. The long escarpment of the Continental Divide. I’m really in the middle of a city but it doesn’t seem that way.
I am a novelist, with a lot of free time and not a ton of direction. I mean, I write. I drink coffee, and I spend a lot of my day outside. My debut thriller was a surprise best seller. I wrote it after I got fired from my job as editor of a national gym equipment trade magazine, where I’d been spending way too much time fantasizing about the ways I would kill the association’s communications director — a treadmill gone haywire was one of the most satisfying. Anyway, the book took off, but the three novels since have notched steadily diminishing sales. I am sensing that my publisher and I are about to part ways.
Kara is a pharmacist who works ten-hour shifts, so we try to see each other for coffee in the morning and at dinner.
I love where I live but here’s a confession: I have never really known what I was supposed to do in my life. Or whom I should listen to. Should I listen to myself? I always seemed to get in trouble that way. It seemed I could aim higher. God? How do you do it? I have tried praying, but I never get a clear message back. My wife? My friend Ted, who is a cop? Good compromises, but I noticed that when I listen to other people all the time, I begin to lose whatever sense of true north I still possess.
This not knowing is a little like tinnitus, a ringing in the ears that never ceases. I can still function and nobody knows I live with a constant drone, but... how clear and relaxed would life be without it? I discovered long ago that the best balm is to be outside and be physical. For a little while I forget.
What I do is: I carry my paddleboard across two hundred yards of grass and I launch where there is a gap in the willows and they have dug granite blocks into the bank and they make two high steps which are also great to sit on. I used to paddle in the evening. There are always a lot of birds — ducks and geese on the water, pelicans in summer, osprey hunting — but I got tired of the motorboats with wakeboarders kicking up waves and all the strollers on the bike path which follows the shore. Also there is a homeless couple under the pedestrian bridge at the lake’s outlet and sometimes they fight and yell. I have seen him strike her with a closed fist more than once, and seen her buckle and lie on the rocks sobbing. I called the cops twice. I saw an officer I recognized on the bike path later and he said she never talks, never testifies, always goes back to the man. Then I didn’t see her anymore.
I like it more quiet. So I started going in the morning. Motorheads tend to be partiers. They’re always blasting music as they tear by, and holding up plastic cups which I’d bet money are not filled with Hawaiian Punch, and so I imagine they are hungover a lot and they tend to sleep in. In the morning, except for the early dog walkers and joggers, I mostly have the lake to myself. Me, the muskrats carving their quiet wakes, the birds. I love it out there. As soon as I step on the paddleboard and am buoyant and free of the shore, all the normal, pedestrian laws of nature fall away and are replaced by a different rhythm, a different sense of gravity. And somehow I forget that I don’t know what I am supposed to do.
And I began to go earlier and earlier. Just at daybreak, when the sky is a crimson flush behind the Dickensian brick chimneys of the middle school; then I really am alone. There might be one or two runners. But if I go even earlier, in the dark, there is no one.
I walk across. Say it’s June. The dew on the grass wets my toes and I hear a night heron croaking on the shore and smell the sediment in the water. The water will be icy from the snowmelt in the tiny creek that flows under the pedestrian bridge at the west end, and as I get closer I can feel the chill. Most of the water in the lake, though, comes from a spring. That’s the legend. The legend is that this was farmland back in the 1800s and the farmer came out to dig a well and hit an artesian gusher and in a few days his cornfield was gone and he had a lake. Maybe it’s true. I like the idea. I like the idea that the lake bore herself into this world and that below the surface calm is a powerful animus of self-expression.
I push through the gap in the willow thicket and sit on the granite boulder. I let the short paddleboard rest on the ground beside me. The heron has ceased, but a redwing blackbird wheezes from a nest somewhere in the branches. No moon, good. Oh, there is one, a slender crescent hanging like a sinking boat over the jaws of the Divide, sallow and lost. Lights along the bike path on the other side of the lake, maybe a quarter mile across, but no movement. I can tell the water is very still and smooth because the ropes of light that extend across barely waver. The murmur of a duck, somewhere close. Are those shadows geese? Probably. They drift without sound. No pale shapes of the white pelicans that migrate here every summer to breed; they must be bedded down on the little island. I breathe. The lake breathes. It seems the wet silt and stone and algae at my feet, and the expanse of dark water, all exhale and I inhale them in. In this way we exchange breath. In this way I gain a little strength...
The only problem with going so early is that I miss Kara for our morning coffee. After a few days I got a note: I don’t know what’s gotten into you. All your spare time is on the damn lake! Miss you. XO. After a few more days she seemed angry when we met at night. She wouldn’t talk about it. I guess I was going out in the evenings too, and had missed a couple of dinners. She rolled away from me in bed when I tried to touch her.
Well, the lake is dependable. She always floats and rocks me, always has something new to say. If there is a wind before sunset and I paddle into it she sprays me happily as I hit each little whitecap. If there is a fog at dawn she embraces and covers me. Always.
Why is there fog? It was June, as I said. The nights were still cold but the water should have been colder. Makes no sense. But why would I ask? I love to get lost in it.
So that first morning of thick fog, I was alone at dawn, happily paddling blind. I felt disembodied in the mist as if I were paddling through outer space with no real up or down, and the fog parted a little before me, and on the glass of dark water there was a sudden suffusion, a glow, and then I clearly saw a man reclined, bearded, under... under a bridge. The picture pulsed once and was replaced by a figure, the same man, striking and striking a woman, until she buckled and fell. And then, like the shadow of a sudden cloud, the black water coalesced into kind of a cloak and blotted out the man.
I must not have been breathing then. I was shocked that a life might end with the toss of a cloak. That it should end. The image on the water looked exactly like the homeless man who slept under the bridge at the east end. For the first time in my life I knew exactly what I was supposed to do.
I am not a geologist. But I know that under a lot of this country lies a bedrock of limestone. That would explain a lot. Limestone tends to be full of water. Pockets, reservoirs, streams, rivers. It erodes easily and can be riddled with tunnels. And so the story of the farmer and his well makes sense. Also the Vanishing Point. What I call it. I noticed in my years living here — nine now — that in cold winters when the lake froze, there was almost always a spot clear of ice in front of my house. The size varied, but almost never got smaller than the area of a couple of tennis courts. Of course that’s where all the water birds congregated. The only open water for miles and it would be full of mergansers and shovelers, geese, canvasbacks, seagulls. My favorite are the green-winged teal. Who could have put all those colors together and made them sing? The burnished-cinnamon head with its swoop of emerald. Slate-gray sides with jaunty white shoulder stripe. Flash of jewel-green in the wing, yellow in the tail. Oh so elegant. Whenever I meet one I tell him that there has never been a thing more gorgeous and I swear he gets the gist.