Making Playlists for Big Water

The hospital where I came to be overlooks Big Water. Not quite on the shoreline, but close enough to imagine that open windows into the 1970s maternity ward might have meant that the lake waving into the land was among the first things I heard and recognized. I was a summer baby – born at the time of day that means rush hour in other, less friendly, times of the year, but that, in late-August, is all about the first cocktail of the evening, and settling in to appreciate the last lights sparkling on the surface of a lake before the sun gets ready to set. 

Were I inclined to believe in astrology (spoiler: I’m not, but it’s okay if you are) – being the earthiest of earth signs makes the intrinsic pull of the water seem strange. I get that Astraea was reluctant to leave for Olympus until things really fell apart, according to some Greeks. She happily hung us with humans while we were virtuous – with no evil existing in the world. Humans are aways going to human though – and as we learned cruelty and corruption, disappointed rather than angry, she upped and left us to our own devices becoming the constellation Virgo. Disappointment and disassociation with evil. From Earth to the stars. I get that, atavistically. They are certainly part of my Virgo-ness. Accounting for my love of Big Water suggests more of a nature-vs-nurture thing.

I toddled by that lake. It’s one of my earliest memories – and among the very few I have of being with my maternal grandfather. Dressed in a suit and a fedora, he took me in hand, as my Middle Little sister made her entrance up in that same building. We rode dinosaurs and explored the bathing pavilion that still features in my complex dreams of the lakeshore all these years later Budapest, George Ezra). (Interestingly, when the Littlest Little sister arrived, I was with my other Grandpa waiting to share the news and her name with the neighbourhood, but that’s another story).

Our parents made our home in the village on the shore cliff of the ancient lake – overlooking the valley now filled with lost and hidden and muddy rivers with a view down to the smaller, though still Big (Great, even) Water to the south of the city. As a wise Guy (Gavriel Kay) once wrote … the memory of water lingers, and of water magic, no matter how far away the sea may be, or how long ago it fell away (Passengers in Time, The Fixx).

Our family summers were always spent with Big Water in close proximity – seemingly endless car rides to find forts and churches and waterfalls, all of which seemed to be clustered around lakes. As a way to entertain the Middle Little and Littlest Little and keep motion sickness at bay, I made-believed that I was an alien with a Scots-Irish accent, an homage to all the extended-family older folks helping to raise us. Passing things of note – landmarks, cities, mountains, and lakes, always lakes – or listening to music (when it was our turn to control the tape deck), I asked the sisters to explain things as we drove along. At the end of each long day, they taught the alien to swim, we talked about things on the tv and read each other books as a way of demonstrating the world to their own, personal, visitor from outer space (Spaceman, The Killers).

Mum and Dad were summer campers. Both had attended and worked at camps north of the city, so, in between the road trips, off we were sent to live and play and work on various lakes for two, then four, then eight weeks each year. 

When I was 13, at a Ping-Pong table on a hill above one of those lakes, I met my brothers. One looked a little like Phil Collins might’ve done at 14, and the other really really loved fencing – the kind with foils, not the wooden ones that separate good neighbours (Should I Stay or Should I Go, The Clash and Someone, Somewhere in Summertime, Simple Minds).

They became the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Stoppard’s version) to my Horatio, with a main character yet to be determined. As things turned out, we needed no depressed prince as our cast continued to grow. The Ensemble became the thing – perfectly balanced. Title character not needed. Those two though. They continue to play the absurdist comic relief for us all, but remain, in keeping with the metaphor, the sounding boards and distractions from madness, as required.

That lake listened to a lot secrets (Freedom, George Michael), and was the place where the players moved beyond our stage names and taught each other – over and over again – the meaning of connection (We’re Going to Be Friends, White Stripes). 

On that beach, as the sun was setting and the stars and Northern Lights began to brighten the darkness, with the chill of August camp reminding us that all things end (The Last Resort, The Eagles), the stage was set for a future that Big Water couldn’t help us anticipate but, yet, reassured us that we’d meet together.

I had some lost years, spent far from Big Water, that meant there were dark days for our theatre as the troupe found new, more featured roles. We held retrospective nights and weekends, of course, but distance can cause disconnection in even the tightest cast of characters, and plot changes that work on paper and in dress rehearsal can fall apart soon after opening nights (Ahead By A Century, The Tragically Hip).

Living between two rivers, where you could always see the other shore and where the banks were constantly shifting meant I was settled and unsettled simultaneously. Weird place to be. Still, I joined new companies, and found purpose – I even had people call me Doctor, for a time – in the work I did and the friendships found on those floodplains. In a boathouse with newly-built docks (the old ones drifted downstream in the storms of that winter) and with a Corona in hand after a day of sailing with my Captain and Life-Coach, I made peace with changes that should have happened years before and set plans for my return home (Southern Cross, Crosby, Stills and Nash).

I resettled just north of what used to be a sandbar in the glacial lake. I can see the Big Water if I stand at the top of the ridge and when the sun is shining the lake gleams in the near distance to remind me of its presence. By design, I’m also within walking distance of most of the people who experienced summers at that other lake with me. 

The past few weeks, under my backyard mountain ash, the wind from the lake feels like August camp – days that would be great for storm sailing, but with a bite that would make swimming less-than-pleasant. As the trees started thinking about shedding leaves, the Harvest moon acts as harbinger (The Whole of the Moon, The Waterboys).

Rosencrantz’ family cottage has become the nexus for an annual tradition that brings us together, in various iterations, for a long weekend outside of things. All the day-to-day gets set aside as we travel to the realm of Gitchi Manitou for some time outside of time. We get the band back together, eat a lot, drink too much, talk, laugh, and cry on an island in the middle of Big Water.

The trip is framed around the The Bay Cup Tournament – a full-contact, no-holds-barred, friendship-testing game of Risk. I don’t play. Like Astraea, I’m a pacifist. A looping soundtrack plays constantly in the background (Melody – Lost Frequencies ft. James Blunt). By day we swim, read, nap, listen to ballgames, and catch up all those things in our lives we don’t get to share as deeply throughout the rest of the year.

From the island, you can only almost see the other shore of the Big Water, but, as the sun goes down, the colours are a backdrop for Group of Seven trees on distant rocks that we can count like blessings, as behind us the fire in the 100-year-old fireplace is stoked for the night. Standing on the Georgian rock the waves let us feel the melancholy and grief from the endings that have happened over the passing years as a different type of quiet descends over the lake (Sad Lisa, Cat Stevens).

On clear nights all the stars are all there. By this point in the year, the sun has started passing through Astraea – our once-Mother-on-Earth – so I focus on Cassiopeia and Orion as my substitute points of stability in the vastness. We argue about what planet is shining so brightly before being extinguished in the lake as the earth turns to hide its flashy sparkle. One Friday night we definitely saw a UFO – zigzagging crazily across the sky before disappearing completely (Ancient Names Pt. 1, Lord Huron).

When unsettling aircraft, spooky stories about Sasquatches and Mothmen, and dropping temperatures force us inside, the fire pops along with the music as we play games that aren’t about world dominance, and laugh until it hurts (Karma Chameleon, Culture Club). 

As some drift to bed, and last logs fade to embers, those remaining revisit decades-long conversations. We talk loss of love (Overpass Graffiti, Ed Sheeran), regretful decisions and miscommunications (exile, Taylor Swift ft. Bon Iver), theology and theogony (You Know it’s Dark When Atheists Start to Pray, Jesse Malin) and always come back around to gratitude for the opportunity to be together once again (Circle, Harry Chapin). Big Water anchors us and lets us hope we’ll be able to do so for years to come.

The moon was full last night, so the beacon fires have been lit, calling us to the Spirit Lake for the first weekend in October. The trip north this year coincides with the 18th anniversary since me, the Middle Little and Littlest Little lost our Mum. Her last days weren’t in that hospital where she firmly informed the well-meaning nurses that my name was Beth, not ‘Little Lizzy’ (thanks for that, Mum). She was out of sight of the Big Water whose steadfastness and wonder she nurtured me to need, but with her true love still by her side, I know that when she left that she carried the lake and its wisdom and magic with her (Timeless, The Airborne Toxic Event).

Losses – the personal and the shared – are coming closer together and at existential levels lately. Even Big Water has to be finding it hard to cope with the weight of our despair about impermanence, something it knows everything about (Changes, David Bowie). When I can’t hear my own voice and I’m stuck on pause – a dispiritingly frequent occurrence these days – Big Water reminds me where I began, helps relocate my sense of place, and reiterates my endless thankfulness for the love, support and fidelity of the cast of characters who have shared, beside so many lakes, all that I am. (Now or Never Now, Metric).