The Water of Life
My daughter has found a snake.
The snake is on a beach.
This tendency of hers—to make discoveries of one thing where another thing should be—is one of her more endearing qualities. In other words, every time we step outside, I have no idea what she’s bound to discover, but I have to be ready for anything, like a snake on the shore of Lake Massabesic.
Never is this habit better tested than around water, more specifically, ponds and lakes around New Hampshire, which she loves to explore.
During a recent pre-tourist-season visit to Kingston State Park, as the silver sparkles of Great Pond come into view, Little Bean’s pace picks up until she’s on a full-blown run, hair flapping, arms out, the little lady being drawn by the lake. Except she isn’t.
Pulling up hard, right before the beckoning water, she skids to a halt and yells out, “Daddy, look!”
Sand shrimp. Thousands of them. Those weird, squiggly, tan buggy things that you never see unless you look. But when you do see them, well, you’ll never miss them again.
The Great Pond forgotten, she sets about playing with her new friends. She calls them amoebas for some reason. They’re given a sand hotel with a rock-lined pool and a little channel to “swim” down to their great sea. She finds some loon feathers and decorates the resort.
We are at the water, but not of the water.
She explores, muddy and wet, a child energized by the pond, but content to sit side by side with her aqua friend–equal compatriots in the dance of play.
She’s always loved being wet, being in the water, but not quite being one with it.
Shells and stones and clams and fish always seemed to interest her more than the very ecosystem from which they derived. She can’t have one without the other, but wrapping her little hands around a pond’s slimy, green algae always seemed to provide more depth than the green waters themselves.
A few weeks later, and we find ourselves the sole inhabitants of Endicott Rock State Historic Site down on Weirs Beach. The day is late and a dark rain is moving in, but being alone out here—at one of the state’s most popular places—is too rare a treat to miss. We’ll take the rain in stride if it comes.
On the way down to the shore, she discovers an abandoned plastic shovel and cracked bucket, and we walked down past the famous rock enclosure, walking along the breaker wall to the very end point.
There, she dumps her bucket of sand and stirs it around, making sand patterns on the rock. Close enough to the water to touch but not touching.
A few rock spiders skitter by, but the gnats and mosquitos never reveal themselves, despite the humidity. Finally, the rain comes, but there’s no storm, and it washes over us and we let it. We walk slowly back to our cars, sandy and wet, but never having touched the actual lake.
I think of Henry David’s famous musing about how a “field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air.” To Thoreau, looking at a pond or lake was like seeing a partition between the wonders of two distinct natural worlds.
“It is continually receiving new life and motion from above,” he wrote. “It is intermediate in its nature between land and sky.”
Like the constantly shifting tidal water line at the ocean, always drawing a distinction between the land and sea; the tide rolls out, the children give chase. The tide comes back, the children are the chased.
My daughter’s submersion hesitation isn’t an aversion to the water, but rather a recognition of all that the lakes and ponds that surround us offer. A buffet of water.
An opportunity to experience it all, the land and the sky, through the reflection of the waves.
Fast-forward to a recent hot day in our backyard, where my daughter and her friends run in circles around a spritzing sprinkler, chasing the water, being chased.
The spinning device is creating a muddy pond in the middle, the children splashing on the outskirts. They laugh and dip their toes, playing tag with one of the most fundamental elements of our lives. The water touches their skin, they run, the mud climbs up their ankles, and the process goes around and around.
We are all creatures of the water, outside of it and in. NHH
BY DAN SZCZESNY | ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN R. GOODWIN
