Soundings

by Dan Laskin

When Jane and I moved here from the Maryland tidewater, we were amused at first to learn that, in Ohio, the coast meant Lake Erie. All of our shoreline associations--surf and shell, fish-scent and gull-shriek, the slap of water on pilings, the roaring whistle of wind--came from the Eastern seaboard. We had been living near the sunrises of the Chesapeake. We had grown up, both of us, looking across whitecaps toward Europe, broken waves running up around our calves and then seething back, tugging, leaving us ankle-deep in Atlantic sand. Jane's girlhood breathed the salt air of Plum Island. I tumbled under the breakers of Jones Beach. Nearby, opening their great arms, were the nation's founding harbors, hers Boston, mine New York.

Lake Erie seemed a poor imitation of the ocean.

We soon came to see that "lake effect" meant more than snow squalls and blind fog. The lake had its own shore personality. It was both enormous and intimate. It could rage or soothe. It spawned a seasonal culture of beaches, marinas, fish joints, and cottage colonies. In Ohio, "to the lake" evoked the same sensation as "to the shore" back East, that feeling of respite and release, of summer on the water as a separate kingdom.

How could it be otherwise? Anyone who has ever poked a stick into a puddle becomes a shore-dweller, I think. As kids, we doodle islands, our own whimsically rounded countries in colored pencil. The coastline has to be jagged, full of coves and headlands, and the rivers have to snake in loops from the interior. It's primal, this satisfaction that we take in current-carved boundaries, land clenched against the encircling sea.

We make grass and mud dams in the gutter just to watch the runoff gather. We send ants rafting downstream on popsicle sticks. By instinct, we build on the water. In the backyard, a hose and a hole make an imaginary world. At the beach, hand-packed tunnels allow the wave-wash to flood the castle courtyard, a second ocean that undercuts the parapets from within.

I can trace my whole life by waters. My friend Kaplan and I used to ride our bikes to a marsh at the base of Little Neck Bay that Kappie called "the old world," where we'd leap streamlets and lose ourselves amid the tall reeds. As teenagers, my brother David and I would walk the nighttime shoreline of our Long Island peninsula at low tide, sneaking beneath the backyards of waterfront homes, smelling the tended lawns above us, the seaweed and dead horseshoe crabs at our feet.

In the Adirondacks, I hiked along the Ausable River and the Bouquet; I climbed to Lake Tear of the Clouds, where the Hudson rises. I drove to and from college across the Throgs Neck Bridge, whose toll booths marked a first passage to adulthood, the portal where I paused when leaving home and, again, returning for the holidays. I started my first job on Lake Champlain. Married a year, Jane and I moved to the Chesapeake country, living on a thick finger of land between the Potomac and Patuxent rivers, and measuring the trip to Massachusetts every Christmas by the bridges we crossed, ribbons over rivers, from the steep Patuxent span at Solomons to the jammed George Washington.

And when we moved to Ohio, telling ourselves that we were now lost to the sea, our boys brought us back by looking down at the Kokosing and asking, "Where does it go?" Perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised by the linkages we found. The Kokosing flows into the Mohican, forming the Walhonding, which joins the Tuscarawas to become the Muskingum, which enters the Ohio, which joins the Mississippi, which washes grandly into the Gulf and out to our ocean.

I have been thinking about these connections during the past few weeks, because the news has made all of us feel like citizens of the Gulf. We're overwhelmed by the suffering, but the intensity of our emotions also rises, perhaps, from that place inside each of us where we live close to the water. The stories coming out of the hurricane remind us of our bonds as Americans. But the storm also struck at our shared imagination, we creatures of the coast, all of us, whose childhood seas and grownup rivers thread us together.

It's appalling to see water and wind turn against us. But it's impossible to believe that we'll forsake them. We'll dream forever, I think, of a place at the shore, and of an alternative life, out of season, in which we don't close up the cottage on Labor Day but stay on, keeping our water views and water solace straight through the cold.