Lake

IT’S A SUMMER DAY ON Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. My brother and I are out on the water. I’m six years old; he’s two years older. A night crawler squirms in my fingers. I drop my baited hook into the lake. My brother is at the stern, wearing that ridiculous, paisley hat of his. He grins broadly, eyes squinting in sunlight. We catch perch and bass and whitefish, bring them to my uncle’s commercial fish house to clean, and fill my grandmother’s freezer. I watch her pan-fry our catch for dinner. We don’t know about mercury or dioxins or PFAs. We don’t know about forever chemicals moving up the food chain and impacting birds and animals. The Eat Safe Fish Guides, with its consumption recommendations, doesn’t exist then.

Heron

IT’S A CLEAR DAY IN JUNE as I walk along the edge of a beaver pond near my home in New Hampshire. Pin cherry and swamp rose greet me, cattails and dog willow, a Baltimore oriole. Out in the water, trees that have been snapped in half jut from the surface like so many dark sticks, and on top of them, giant bundles of twigs and branches. I shield my eyes and count nine nests, most of them occupied. A heron rookery. And how many fledglings? I try to count them—maybe eleven, mouths agape, bulging eyes, bodies all bony, scrawny, and fuzzy. They croak and squawk, rattle and chatter. I want to laugh and dance. I don’t know the world as a scientist, don’t know data and numbers. But oh, how I love, I want to tell the herons. “Can you feel it?” I want to ask. And I am certain my heart is fluid. It moves inside me.

On the opposite side of the cove in shallow water stand three adult herons, stoic and still. Then the sudden speed and precision as they plunge their heads under the surface. And I wonder, of course I do, if there is methylmercury in these waters.

Fish

REVISITING THE WATERS of my childhood, sunlight beams from the west. I sit in my truck, windows down, Lake Michigan in front of me, pallets stacked six feet tall on the jetty, and in the air the fresh, mineral tang of lake water; decaying plant matter and fish; the occasional waft of gasoline. A fisherman straddling a four-wheeler pulls up alongside me—one of the tribal fishers. We pass conversation back and forth. Sensations swirl inside me, sweet and sharp and nostalgic, this feeling that I have life here. The man invites me to his garage where he keeps his nets and coolers, opens a freezer, two-thirds full with catch, and offers me fillets of whitefish. “As long as the fishing’s good, we eat good,” he says.

Back home, I familiarize myself with Michigan’s Eat Safe Fish Guides—which fish are not safe to consume, which fish to catch, from which waters. I read about the weekly and monthly allowed portions for each species—four servings of yellow perch a month? We ate a lot more perch than that growing up. I think about the people who rely on fishing for their sustenance, of the fish their families consume.

I don’t know the world as a scientist, don’t know data and numbers. But oh, how I love, I want to tell the herons. ‘Can you feel it?’

Loon

I’M SLEEPING IN A SINGLE, trekking pole tent that weighs twenty-eight ounces, my dog spooned beside me. It’s a cold September night. About fifty yards below us, Lake Superior rocks gently against its northern shore, little ripples like those made when stepping into a bathtub. I’m awoken by a long, wailing call. Half-awake, I think of elk, their distinct, haunting calls, rising in pitch. But I’m in Ontario, and there are no elk in these parts. My dog doesn’t stir. I rise to relieve myself, the sky moonless and starlit, a gentle lisp in the branches of the northern pine. I think of wolves and bears and wildness. From somewhere across the bay, the call comes again. “I’m listening,” I whisper. “I hear you.”

In the morning the sun rises crisp and bold, and I chase its warmth over boulders, then perch on a ledge, coffee held with both hands. From the mouth of the bay, they come, five loons, glistening black heads and bodies of checkerboard plumage, swimming and preening and fishing, the occasional rise with wings outstretched, the tremolo of their voices. Of course. It was you. My heart flutters. I know they see me. All of me erodes away here, that’s what I feel, not a woman at all drinking her coffee, but a place going about its life.

Back home, half of New Hampshire’s loon population is gone. Lead poisoning is responsible for so many of their deaths. Even with lead bans in place, people still use lead sinkers. We did when we were children, six and eight, then eight and ten, tying fishing line with our small fingers, threading the line through lead weights and lures and bobbers. At the transfer station, next to the hopper, I see a metal drop box with the words: “Leave your lead sinkers and fishing lures here.”

River

I WALK ALONG MY NEIGHBORHOOD RIVER, the Contoocook. My skin draws August heat from the air. I continue to the bridge, the river spinning whitecaps beneath me. How many times did my husband and I sit beneath this bridge? Walks at dawn, the sun rising in layers of apricot and tangerine, our voices a transverse of hurt and anger and sadness. We’d walk, and talk, and come here trying to give voice to a marriage that was broken. One morning, and then another, and then another still. Here we watched a rock pigeon build its nest. Were graced by a heron standing tall on a boulder, the river breaking around him. If my arm were longer, I could have touched him. That’s how close he felt. Like a god. And it was true, I felt God that morning, his eyes shining on me.

Upriver, in another town, my two grandsons are fishing this afternoon. In my mind, I see them, all squeals and shouts, their little legs splattered in mud, toes squishing in sediment, the elder’s shoulders arched back from the weight of the fish on his line. At four years old, he’s not afraid to bait his own hook or hold the fish he has caught to remove the hook from its mouth. I give him steel lures and sinkers made from tin and tungsten.

“Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine,” Mary Oliver wrote, “then keep on going.”

Want to spend more time between water and sky? Pick up Diane’s new novel today.