Iyow - in your own words

My parents have a cabin in Canada. It sits by itself on a small, nameless island, near where the St. Mary’s River flows into the North Channel. This time of year, as I look out on the soot-black snow and those low winter clouds that smell like pollution – the way old curtains smell like cigarettes – I think of that cabin in Canada, with the sun pouring in and warm, pine-scrubbed wind rushing to fills its rooms. I think of the clear water down by the dock, and the place where I can wade into it, my bare feet gliding across the rocks one by one until there are no more rocks and I sink completely in and feel the shock of the cold biting through to my bones.

It takes about an hour to swim the full distance around the island, or maybe a little more if it’s windy. First I swim against the current, in the open waters on the south side of the island. The waves slap against my face and once in a while I gulp water instead of air and taste minerals and plants and fish. If I see a big wave coming soon enough, I dive into it and listen to the weird, underwater roar as the water rushes past my ears. I pretend I’ve fallen into the water from a great height, and that somewhere above people are looking after me, thinking that I cannot have survived the fall. I blow out the last of my breath and sink further down, not wanting to resurface; to disillusion them and begin the long, humiliating journey back.

I get tired quickly at first because I’m trying to move fast and stay high in the water, out of reach of things unseen in the green depths below. Lamprey eels, for example, have been known to mistake a human thigh for the white underbelly of a Lake Trout. When they strike it’s like being struck with a barbed arrow. There is no removing it without making a second wound far more grievous than the first.

But soon I get used to the fear, the way you get used to the affects of a powerful drug. I embrace the fear because it cleanses the mind, forces out in an instant all the worthless and disheartening ruminations stored up during a winter of relentless introspection. Twenty minutes swimming in open water, against the current, with no bottom beneath you and no shore you can reach, and suddenly everything that was in your head an hour ago is gone. And the new thoughts that come in to replace the old are beautifully simple and sharp, like sunlight reflected off the edge of a single blade of grass.

About half way around this side of the island there is a small cove protected from the waves. That’s where I take my first rest. I climb out and walk up to this place where two boulders face each other. Really, it’s two halves of the same boulder, split a millennia ago, when our island broke off from the island opposite. I like to sit there with my feet dangling over the edge of one of the boulders. There’s a depression in the side of the rock the exact size and shape of my heel. I slide my heel down until it locks into place, and at that moment I feel the whole presence of the boulder, the weight of it pressing down on the earth; the massive void at its center. Then a wave hits the bottom of the boulder just right and sends a geyser of water up to lap at my legs, beckoning me to come back in. So I do.

Around the back of the island the water is shallow and warmer. I can see the bottom now, but I don’t want to touch it, because it’s a goo of rotted leaves and mud and sewage from the days when cities up stream dumped directly into the river. When I was younger, I panicked once back there and put my feet down, thinking I’d stand up, the way you might in the shallow end of the pool. But the mud grabbed hold of my feet and I sunk down. There didn’t seem to be any bottom to it. My sister had to fetch a fallen limb and use it to pull me in toward shore. With every step I pulled up mushroom clouds of rotten lake bottom. The water around me smelled like a battlefield littered with dead.

But today, I just glide through this part, enjoying the perfect stillness of the water, watching my shadow play over the undisturbed bottom. Then I round a point and start up the other side of the island. Now the current is at my back, carrying me out toward the open water again. But blocking my path are two flat rocks with a narrow channel running between. They have the salmon pink color peculiar to rocks in that part of Ontario, which are supposed to be some of the most ancient surface rocks on earth. In places the rock is rippled from the time when it was the sandy bottom of an ocean. Or at least, that is the explanation I have heard people give.

I climb out and sprawl across the sun-baked surface of the rocks and feel the chill slowly drain out of me. When I’m ready, I stand up and explore this desolate place in a slow, resolute way, as though mapping out a continent. This is where the seagulls drop fish to kill or stun them before eating, so most of the rocks are splattered with gull shit and fish blood. If it’s been a long time since a big storm blew the waves over the rocks, you might find a puddle or two overgrown with algae and crawling with water bugs. Sometimes there’s a half-submerged frog, stupefied from the heat and the rich diet of bugs, staring straight forward without seeing.

One year the water was so low and the rocks so high and dry that a raspberry bush took seed in a deep crevice and grew up to two or three feet high. It didn’t produce more than half a dozen berries. When I arrived, one of them had just fallen of its own accord and lay baking on the rock, its sugary juice just beginning to ooze out of it. I picked it up and put it in my mouth and swallowed it as if it was nothing. My tongue registered just a little warmth, and something bitter-sweet. But the taste of it stayed with me for a long time. It was still there as I lay in bed that night trying to fall asleep, feeling the chill of the water carried in on the wind.