What the Lake Wants

Living in the future of drowned cities, and other cheerful thoughts

This is not the post I planned to write for today. With the other essay I’ve been working on—there’s a big fish on the hook, and I’m trying to patiently reel it in so I don’t snap the line. That one will have to wait. Today’s post will be more off-the-cuff and personal than usual; our regularly scheduled programming will hopefully resume next week.

I’ve been having a weird time lately. Spring arrived early here in the Finger Lakes. The snowdrops bloomed over a month ago now; the crocuses and daffodils have already been and gone. As wonderful as it is to have the winter weather behind us, the changing seasons have a heaviness this year.

Summer was when my dad was most active. In years past, summer meant tuning up the lawnmower, getting his bike out, tackling all the outdoor projects that had been put off by the snow. It meant getting the cottage ready—looking forward to weekends at the place he’d spent his own summers growing up, his favorite place in the world.

This year it means finding a way to do all those things without him for the first time. It means going back up to the cottage for a memorial service with the people he grew up with: standing next to the little lake he loved so much—where he learned to swim, where he taught me and my brother when we were big enough, where he played in the water with my children—and trying to make sense of the place without him there.

He’s been very present in my mind these past few weeks.

Meanwhile, next to the big lake where we live now, we’ve been sitting with the updated flood maps that FEMA is preparing to release.

The once and future lake, according to FEMA.

Our home has always been in a floodplain. We knew that the maps hadn’t been updated since the 1980s; I guess there was some faint hope that—when the maps were redone—things might look better instead of worse.

Doesn’t seem to be the case, unfortunately. The artificial waterways have been filling up with sediment for decades now. Some flood control projects have been proposed, and that might help for a while; still, with the increasingly extreme weather—more rain, less snow, stronger storms—I’m not sure if anyone knows how effective those measures will be, or how long they’ll last.

So now we’ve got decisions to make.

We’re extremely fortunate to live in a wonderful neighborhood. All that flat land makes it very walkable. Our kids would be able to walk to school from now until they graduate. There are parks and museums and one of the oldest farmers’ markets in the country within easy biking distance. Staying here means a certain amount of freedom from needing a car: the kids can go out on their own with their friends when they’re old enough, without depending on us to taxi them around. My wife and I spent our respective childhoods marooned in houses that were a twenty-minute drive away from anything worth doing. We’re loathe to deny our kids that freedom, if we have a choice.

If we have a choice.

There are billions of people who don’t have a choice about the future they get, and there’s a good chance we’re among them now. The choice might not be about what we want.

It might be about what the lake wants.

This is a very practical application of an animist perspective—of “thinking with” and “acting as if,” even if we don’t believe that the lake really has a kind of consciousness.

There’s plenty of vague gesturing in this direction in progressive circles, toward making decisions based on the imagined personhood of the land. But this often fails, because people want to imagine the land as a kindly old grandparent—the nurturing sort who wishes you would make better choices, would visit more often, but will resign themselves to quiet, long-suffering disappointment if you keep screwing up.

In our case, it makes more sense to imagine the lake as an angry demigod that has the power to comprehensively fuck up our lives if we keep trifling with it.

A lake is a patient thing. This one has vast, quiet depths, and a huge capacity to absorb the things that are sunk into it. It has a long memory. The lake enjoyed being part of a swamp that was full of life for millennia. A thousand years is a pleasant day in the sun for a lake. After a brief time, people showed up: they fished on its shores, built little bark houses on the hills around it, but mostly left the lake to do what it wanted, knowing that the lake could be impulsive in spite of its patience.

And then new people showed up and drove off the first people. They burned down the bark houses and dug up the burial mounds, razed the sacred hills and dumped the earth into the lake. The new people filled in the swamp so they could have more farmland, more space for people, more lebensraum.

And the lake waited, because a century or two is a minor inconvenience for a lake.

The new people built new buildings over the old swamp—built docks and shantytowns and racetracks and parking lots, pushed further and further into the lake’s domain. The new people believed that the old swamp and the lake’s old kingdom were safely sequestered in the past, because they were making the future for themselves. They killed the animals that loved the lake, and they may have accidentally spilled some poison into it, one or two hundred times. And the lake has continued to be patient.

But what does the lake want now?

It’s looking like the lake wants its swamp back. The lake has gotten tired of these impetuous people and their silly little projects. It’s been talking with the waterfalls in the cliffs above, who are also tired of being dammed up and denied their full power; the waterfalls remember how things used to be, too, back before these fragile creatures started bustling around with their schemes. They want it all back. They want what belonged to them for thousands of years before.

A hundred years is a doddle for a lake. It will take a while for things to return to normal: a few centuries dealing with the indignity of all that detritus washing around in its waters, the noxious chemicals that bubbled into it when their containers ruptured. The animals that are left will suffer for a bit. But the lake is patient, and in a thousand years—no time at all, really—all that the people left behind will sink back into its quiet depths. A new swamp will raise itself up around all those old buildings. The lake will settle back into its accustomed domain with a contented sigh. Maybe, in time, people will come back to build little bark houses on the hills again, to fish on its rubbled shores and watch the lake from a respectful distance, because the ruins of what the first people built will stand as a warning.

I’m afraid that’s what the lake wants.

But for now—the flowers are blooming, and my kids can walk to school, and play in the park where the swamp used to be. Maybe there’s still a little more time, if the lake can be patient a bit longer. Maybe we still have a choice about what we want.

Maybe.