August 26th
Goodbye Lake Champlain,
My bathing suit is still wet with you; drying on the backseat of the car. Our summer week together was lovely. I swam in you each morning and several times throughout the day. You were always there, sometimes tranquil, sometimes grumpy. You never said no. You couldn’t speak.
Occasionally, when I visited, there were others. Young children and adults, jumping into you from docks and rocks, fishing in you from boats and from shore. But you always had time and space for me. We were alone when we shared the rain together. It swelled you, sprinkling on my tiny head.
When I was young, your enormity intimidated me. I feared your depths. That they might choke me down at any moment. I panicked and exited your waters quickly, unsatisfied with my experience, and exasperated by my own timidity. But that’s not what you wanted. I learned to take a part of you for my own, something that I could handle. Knowing part of you was much better than not knowing the whole.
I learned too, to dive deeply, from your highest cliffs down to grassy depths where I was far away from my world. I felt graceful, looking up at your surface. My own buoyancy then propelling me upward. Eventually breaking through.
You keep out the air. Holding only enough to sustain fishes. And thus our visits must remain brief and therefore sweet. Goodbye, Lake Champlain. Soon you will become cold and frozen, inaccessible to my human flesh. For now we must part but the season for our love will soon return.
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Down from Burlington to the Berkshires in Western Mass, I drove on State route 100 through pristine mountains, inhabited by streams, lakes, and cyclists. I took turns at a leisurely pace to the tune of Alasdair Fraser, Scottish fiddle champion. Windows down, flooded with the Vermont summer, I stopped to change in a dirt lot for a swim in a crystal cool lake.
Continuing on, I thought of the pounds of blueberries I had just picked. Waiting patiently as a gift for my next host. Resting in the cooler. Ready to be eaten by a fruit-starved trail crew.
My unoccupied passenger seat (Sam was in Cape Cod) was briefly occupied by a large and sweaty stranger who was hitching; homeward-bound after work; he had lost his license for selling drugs. After two miles, a fork in the road signaled our departure from one another. The brief occupation of my privacy sweetened the rest of the day; calling attention to the freedom of driving alone.
Then I parked in the Berkshires of Massachusetts and gathered my things for several days on the Appalachian trail.
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