Sometimes

Fall is the slow exhale of the earth. The sun’s rays grow ever scarcer as the frosts arrive. Long shadows cut the cold honey sunlight of afternoons that begin to fade at three, turning to a blue-pink twilight over the lake before darkness descends at five. Then four-thirty. Then four. A slow exhale of light.

Not long after we returned from California, Corrinne and the kids left to visit her family in Dallas. Jasper and I spent the evenings wandering the lake shore, waiting on the snow. There’s a trail that runs the length of the property here, about a quarter mile I’d guess, with a couple of beaches in hidden coves and a picnic table.

The first time I walked down here and saw the table I thought of something one of my editor said to me years ago, “you have a nack for finding tables in the middle of nowhere.” I suppose I do. I hate working indoors. I hate being indoors.

Perhaps I find these tables because I’m always looking for places to be outdoors. My favorite spot is still a huge rock in the middle of the Oconee river where I did most of my writing in college. Not sure I’d have graduated without that rock. These days I write with a laptop, at least for work, so tables are nice (though I do avoid the laptop when possible).

Soon it will be far too cold to work out here, but for now it’s perfect. I write, the dog wanders the woods. Periodically we both look up and stare out at the lake. It’s hard not too, it dominates the skyline like an ocean. Even when you can see a shore opposite, as you can where we are in the Chequamegon Bay, you can still feel something vast about Superior, even in these shallow waters here.

In early November at these latitudes dawn happens to be right around the time I get up (roughly 6 AM, though I am fortunate enough to not have to set an alarm, so it varies). I started taking the dog down to the seashore every morning to watch the sunrise. This is when I began to really notice the many moods of Superior. It is a different lake every day.

I like stormy days the best. I’ve always loved storms. It might sound odd, but one of my favorite things is to get caught out in a storm, pitching a tent in a hurry, or taking shelter under a rock overhang, a tree, a large leaf, as the rain pours down, the wind whips, the thunder cracks all around. Everything feels more alive at those moments. I feel more alive. Something about a storm sharpens the edges of perception, hones your body to an awareness that’s difficult to achieve otherwise.

Everything comes alive in a storm. Get out in one if you can. Or just before one, when the lightning is still a ways off, flashing out there on the horizon, the wind picking up, that preternatural darkness of storm, thunderheads obscuring the light of day. It feels as if the world is just waking up, coming alive, with something urgent to say. The air tingles with that potent mix of electricity and ozone, it smells like infinite possibility, life expanding boundlessly.

Storms like that are rare here. That’s more out west, or down south. The best storms here are sudden, generated by the lake. They call them lake effect storms. They come on incredibly fast, without any warning. It is both scary and energizing. It is unlike anywhere else I’ve ever been, any other storms I’ve been in. And they disappear just as fast. That’s the summer though. Winter storms are perhaps something else, I don’t know yet. I’m waiting. Walking the lake’s edge, waiting. Come on storms. Come on winter. Come on.