Whereabouts do you live, roughly speaking, and what drew you to that place in particular?
I'm in Michigan, and that's as specifically as I will answer that question! We have really lethal lakes.
Seconding the tags. Lovely poetry
look, yes, of course a pond will kill you. A little-L lake will kill you, if you are careless enough, but they are lazy things, pitcher plant predators, and they do not hunger. The Great Lakes remember when they were the blistering endless winter and the slow crush of ice reshaping the land. They remember the implacable starvation of an unbreaking cold across the continent, and they carry that ancient ice water in their bellies, hungry still. Lake Superior wears her winter boldly, and she will wrench frigid breath from your lungs in the heat of August and pull you, unrotting, to her depths. Huron beckons you further and further from shore with such a gentle slope, so easy, until you are finally chest-deep in the water but you cannot see the shore anymore, only the endless expanse of her. Erie sends her fogs like snowfall, whiteout blizzards, blinding you to her rocky shallow basin, reaching up to claw the belly of boats. Lake Michigan pretends, charming, a child's ocean, and her longshore tides creep along her beaches and tear away anyone foolish enough to believe the clear blue lie of her docility, most lethal of all.
Ontario is no business of mine.
Here, in order of appearance: Superior, Huron, Michigan and Erie.
The Great Lakes aren't haunted. No matter what anyone says, the Lakes aren't haunted. They are the memory-eaters, the old dark painted over with charming blue, and what sinks does not rise, not even the dead. When the Lake raises goosebumps, it isn't the bodies in the depths. It's just the Lake, reminding you that you are mostly water and water calls to its own.
The oceans, the old saltwater womb, warn you with every breaker that they are dangerous. The oceans never let you forget that you crawled from their hold, with your saltwater veins, but not all of your ancestors did, and there are things beneath the ocean tides, waiting with teeth to spill the blood you stole. The oceans with their shawls of hurricanes, their steady beating, make it impossible to forget the threat of them.
But the Great Lakes? The Lakes will lie to you. The Lakes will not gift you the buoyancy of saltwater, will tempt you with still surfaces and cool drinkable freshwater. The Lakes will promise that there is nothing with teeth waiting below, as though the Lake itself is not the maw of something hungry. The Lakes are new to the world, in the scale of epochs, and they play games. They lap at your knees like they are tamed, but if you swim long enough there will be a moment where the Lake throws you sideways, pulls you under, and you remember that this is a wild thing, with teeth of ice and nothing but water in its belly. They hold the last breath of every foolish swimmer that lowered their guard for a second too long, and the carcasses of centuries of shipwrecks, and they do not surrender what they take. No, the Lakes are not haunted. The Lakes are not cursed. There is no monster waiting in the depths, only the depths themselves, and that is enough.
They say that freshwater doesn't lay quiet in its bed until it's had its measure of blood, and the Great Lakes are thrashing at their shorelines.
Oh, my darlings, bodies and shipwrecks and memories are not the only things the Great Lakes devour--seasons, too, the Lakes cling to. All summer long the Lakes hold tight to the chill of winter, scattering cool breezes off their shoulders onto the coast. All summer long the Lakes hoard heat, storing it down in the deep thermal reservoir of fresh water, the golden heart of sunlight tucked away for the dark winter months. All summer long the Lakes steal warmth from the air and store it away, and when the sharp northern winds bring winter, the Lakes breathe out the last ghost of summer and fling themselves skyward. When the air is freezing, the Lakes have held fast the deep battery of summer, and the warm memory of July evaporates from the water and crystallizes in the atmosphere as January snow. All summer long the Lakes trade in winter winds, and all winter they shake out the white storm coat of summer.
