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For all my fathers, real and imagined
PROLOGUE
On a summer’s day the Lake seems vaster than it is, blue waves rolling from west to east under the urging of the prevailing summer-time wind. Out here, only the sun is audience, spectator. The waves, a thousand thousand of them, merge one into the other with a circular, sexual violence. Pause, interplay, slight sweat of foam, touch of the wind’s magic, and new waves breeding before them — endless life-cycle of motion and urgent journeying, west to east, over and over. A journeying. But where? To what end?
If the sun knows he isn’t about to tell — watching, way up, above it all. Feeling his heat reborn in each contraction of wave mounting wave. Content to let his other face lie in the vast mirror below, moving with it, going wherever it must go. Audience and actor, as it were, caught up in the simultaneous movement of the play, in league with the plot, each in his own way believing in playwrights, denouements, endings.
No doubt this naivete, this trust, is due to the perspective of things. Up here (which is where we are now, somewhere closer to sun than earth) what was vastness below, what seemed to be a meaningless, self-sustained and pointless motion of water turns out to be, from this heady angle, simply a lake. What the waves don’t know (and we, up here, now do) is that there are shores all the way round, containing and contributing to this journeying of wavelets, that there is a beginning and an end to the formless water. In fact a river to the north, another to the south: in apparent contradiction, we can see, to the prevailing west-east urging of the waves or to what those in them or on them must necessarily feel. But the Lake, vast or simple, is big enough to hold all obtruders — steamships, tankers, sailboats, swimmers — suspended in the space of its self-cancelling cross-currents.
The ships, of course, know where they’re going or have been: out to sea or back in from it. The sailboats, less sure of themselves, are nevertheless venturesome, drifting far out where the shoreline is a hazy horizon, the wind, always reliable in summer, their last contact with land. The swimmers (I use the term loosely, for most never leave the shelter of the sand-beaches) edge cautiously into the last wave, content to feel water under or over them, but giving in ultimately to the wind, the current, pushing them back gently where they belong.
As we move higher (assuming you’re still with us) closer to that watchful but unparticipating spectator, these venturings, these certainties become what they are: illusions. For there is really no shore: land, yes, but from this angle it is clear that the water has its will. Even the river at the southern extreme is seen to hold the current for a fraction of a moment only, an inch of distance, before new lakes are born and reborn. And what we thought were waves, individual and self-generating, or wind-driven currents, are merely water now, sea without salt, oceans in embryo. And the sun can no longer be described as a watcher from its own night, for there— you can see its face mirrored in every surface, its light transformed in the tidal energies that move with their own terrible inevitability.
So what are these ships now? That seemed to move like floating cities with such disdain for current or tide? Going to or coming from, the sea has its will with them, the last word. And those swimmers, what of them? Are they not grains of sand, washed out (albeit bravely) from the same beach which takes them back gratefully with the next wave? It’s hard to be certain, though, for we are not accustomed to such heights; we’ve been up here far too long already; vertigo is setting in, the wax begins to melt. Mirage or mirror, who can tell?
That’s better. It’s July. The sun (our sun) is high overhead; a westerly wind sweeps over the Lake from the distance of water, the far-off States. Our wavelets have found their way to the southernmost reaches of the Lake. No ships to challenge the current, indeed no swimmers along the ample beaches. The waves move with their solitary and collective energy into the river below. And we can see, just where lake and river merge — that vast and diluted movement gathering speed and audible power — what we had overlooked till now: the village, the point of meeting. It looks as if it has been there always, a natural impediment redirecting the eastward (and dangerous) flow to the south. Or an outpost guarding the land crouched behind it. For our village lies on a tiny peninsula of sand surrounded on one side by marshes and dunes, on the other by forests obviously as old as the earth sustaining them. But of course this is mere fancy, or rather the illusion of our less heady perspective. Nevertheless, it would be easy (and comforting) to believe that peninsula and village sprang fully-formed from some ancient glacial twinge. In any case, whether from necessity or predilection, it serves its purpose: the Lake pours its waves upon the exposed beaches and finds them conveniently redirected; the prevailing winds sweep water and sand up and over till the forests hold them. Certainly no one living there could fail to feel the presence of those tides we have mentioned, however little they — or any unwinged human — understood the meaning in their movement.
Did we conclude that there were no swimmers here on this sunny afternoon of mid-July in, let’s say, 1939? Well, you can see how wrong we were, and why. Two small figures, boys perhaps (that is why we overlooked them?) too far out for their own good. Closer now, we can see they areboys, too old for children who would not dare so much, too young to be called men who would know better.
The waves on this day are gentle but big enough to be challenging and they swim strongly into them, arms stroking the water simultaneously, muscles moving in unison. As if, like fish, they gained courage by travelling together. And how large that challenge must look from their level! To the north-west, the angle of their swimming, there is no horizon. The Lake seems to rise higher than the land that must lie somewhere behind it so that one has the feeling of swimming not out but up. And they must have known, though they could not see, they had trespassed beyond the sinister line where the water turns from blue to dark green.
Suddenly (for the vigorousness of their perfectly matched strokes gave no indication of a slackening of the will) as if a bell has been rung, the young swimmers stop, disappear beneath the surface, then bob back into view. Only now they are heading shoreward with exactly the same determination that marked their moving out. Thus it can not have been fatigue which caused this sudden change of course. Does the blood have a barometer to measure the weather of waves? Can the skin take temperature, calculate depth from the chill of water? Is there some delicate timing device deep in the brain to sound the alarm, the secret adrenalin running, fear in the blood, in the lungs? Whatever the cause, the sun on this July day must have been as bemused as we — strangers to the vertical perspective — to watch the synchronized motion of two boys swimming back.
From their level the shoreline ahead must seem as strange and terrifying (if indeed such feelings were manifest in young and foolish minds) as the vastness of the Lake behind them. Sand beaches glisten from far right to far left to the edge of the eye-lid. Beyond them only the dunes, a scattering of poplars, and the faceless sky. Just as it was and had been since the last geological twinge. The village, yet to be born, is nowhere visible.
As they draw closer in, however, the landmarks of the year 1939 one by one make their reassuring appearance. On the left, the Pier, or breakwater — even now a community joke: someone had dreamed a harbour there in greener days. There is no harbour and all that remains of the Pier is a double row of forlorn and crookedly-driven spiles with chunks of concrete dumped between. The Lake has long ago decided not to take the thing seriously, indeed seems rather kind, almost deferential, as it rolls over, under and (more often) through it. Nor are the harbour-dreamers taken seriously any more, especially by those who have built a proper one safely downriver and constructed a city around it — showing, I should add, scant gratitude to this valiant forerunner of piers or to the pugnacious villagers who dreamed it into being.
On the right: the Bridge, almost a year old but just as strange as the day when the two halves met in the middle, high over the rapids below. Strange, because somehow the River seemed less, spanned by a gawky arch of steel, a shadow over water and sky. Most villagers, however, managed to suppress whatever secret reservations they felt — streaming across to the bright city on the other side. Another country. Full of cities as big and bigger than this one, stretching back and beyond who knows how far. Each with its own strangers, its dangers, its allure: Even the boys, perhaps these very swimmers, could be seen on a summer’s day perched like pigeons on the farthest