In winter the beach is desolate from the sharp grass of the sand cliffs to the hem of ice chunks the lake wears until March. The sand runs smooth and true as plate glass, and the tiny footsteps my children make seem remarkable, the paths they form, poetic. In the winter the beach belongs to the wind, of course, uncovering stones as round and flat as silver dollars, rolling the soft sand in flowing drifts-"frolic architecture" Emerson called it-in elegance unmatched by anything manmade. Just the seagulls are here now-and the deer. My daughter puts two little fingers in the cloven prints they leave behind.
Just being here makes me confess hypocrisy, as if my real purpose in coming here were my children's benefit. Lake Michigan, this magnificent presence, still attracts me, still leaves me in awe, too full of the touch of its presence to explain it clearly. So while my kids write their names in the sand with the tail feather of a seagull, I let it work its mystery on me in its own inimitable, silent way, the way it always has.
It tells me things I've always known but never really taken the time to believe. Its incredible size mocks my own smallness. Its eternal rhythm reveals the transience of my own life and mocks my ambition. Filling the entire eastern horizon, its immense presence portrays what Thoreau called the "quiet desperation" of my daily living.
And yet, paradoxically, it strengthens me amid all this humiliation. I am reminded, Calvinist that I am, of the interdependence of the sand and the water and the gull and the deer and the sky; and within it all, my self, man, God's final creation during that first incredible week, this lake, somehow, still remembers. My children's meandering paths only emphasize the lesson, because they fit in too. I don't remember it, but there must have been a time when I, like my children, looked at all of this as just the world's greatest sandbox.
We all need our Lake Michigans. Novelist John Fowles says he feels it most in the forest, this inescapable sense of having to measure oneself and one's ambitions in the face of the eternal. I was brought up on the lake; I feel it here. When I see my father-in-law's eyes sweep up over 40 acres of soybeans and scan the horizon of Iowa farmland, I know he feels it too.
My daughter says her hands are cold, so we head back to the car. It is time, I suppose. That's when I soften enough to forgive those first Calvinist settlers who knew that the beach could grow no corn, who left the beautiful shoreline to today's "beautiful people." I can forgive because I learned from them another of those fretful paradoxes of faith: having been awed by His presence, He tells me to go back now, to leave, to return to the world of quiet desperation. It’s a command. It’s not a request. Eventually it gets hard to breathe on a mountaintop. The beach, no matter how beautiful, is as sandy as a desert. Such is the nature of retreat. It is done only in order to return uplifted, strengthened, more sure, perhaps, of who we are, what we are about, but never as an end in itself, no matter how ravishing.
Out here, facing the vast horizon of perfect blues, its strain of sky and water barely visible, I find it easy to sing, “This is my father’s world.” Back at the office, five floors up overlooking a skyline of a million people, it’s not as easy, even though it’s just as true. Having been here, I know it once more.
After the car warms, my daughter asks if we can come back again sometime.
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