Citation

Wien CA. Can. J. Environ. Educ. 2008; 13(2): 159-168.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008)

DOI

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PMID

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Abstract

The lake is blue black and deep. It is a glaciated finger lake, clawed out of rock when ice retracted across Nova Scotia in a northerly direction during the last ice age. The lake is narrow, a little over a mile long, and deep, 90 to 190 feet in places according to local lore, off the charts in others. The author loves to swim there, with a sense of incalculable depth below it, the open sky above it--an illusion of a double infinity. The author has been swimming there for twenty-six years. In the early years she was also a runner. When she was told that she could no longer run due to injuries, the author shifted her five-mile jog into the lake, put some distance, perhaps a mile, into her swim. While she could still run, she and her children would swim to the big pine with a long branch that hung over the water. Someone had knotted a rope over it. They could stand six feet up on shore, and someone in the water would swing the rope up. The jumper would catch it, leap and wrap the legs around the knot in one motion, fly out over the water, and drop into the deep. It required daring and good timing, a mother's judgment about when children could safely try it. That tree fell in a storm eighteen years ago, the memory of kids and mother swinging into the water held now in the sweeping, weathered roots that wrap bare rock like driftwood. In this essay, the author reflects on her memories of this lake.

Language: en