Dark Water Lake

Autumn comes early to Dark Water Lake. 

Fire-colored leaves cover the ground and crunch underfoot and you can see the sky through the trees.  Some make it to the water, floating lazily on the surface with no destination or direction.  They drift singly or in bunches, catching random streaks of sunlight and flickering brightly for a moment or two.  Some will snag on the shore, others will reach the dam, all will molder and die.  Replacements will be born come spring when the weather turns warm again but for now the woods are going into hiding, full of shadows and dark corners.  Even the dogs stay close, unwilling to explore at their usual pace, unusually tentative and cautious.  Dark Water Lake in October is beautiful, placid, yet somehow vaguely treacherous, almost two-faced.  We walk quickly and a little anxiously among the moss and mushrooms - some finely tuned sense tells me it's best not to linger - and I can't help but think that the dogs feel it as well.  Some old Shakespeare line dances around the edges of my mind, something about smile and be a villain.  I think the lake may know it too.   

There is great beauty here but somehow it seems lightly veiled in menace.  Dark Water has taken its share of innocents over the decades - careless fishermen, unattended children, some who just swam too far out - it's said that if you were to get to the bottom, you'd find the missing boats and the bodies, now just parts of the lake's underwater landscape.  But it's also said that the lake goes on forever, that the depth is so deep into the earth that it's unreachable.  Such tales are easily forgotten or set aside during the high summers when the water is littered with sailboats and families gather on the shores for picnics and swimming.  But come October when the air turns colder and the branches begin to bare, they don't seem quite so far-fetched.  There are lake gods, the old people say, who snatch victims as easily as a spider snares a fly, snatch them and drag them under the calm, dark water.  Of course it's all myth, invented by anxious parents and bored, old porch sitters with nothing better to do than pass time and spin yarns...unless of course, it isn't.  Unless there really are restless ghosts and angry spirits who guard the lake and don't much care for those who trespass. 

What you see ain't always what you get, Sparrow reminds us, Don't be deceived by surfaces.  You never really know what goes on underneath, not in a person and not in a lake.

Ain't you the philosopher, Uncle Willie remarks caustically, a regular Will Rogers. Mebbe you oughta be writin' a book.

Sparrow takes no offense.  Reckon I know what I know, old man, he says mildly, And it don't take no books.

I suppose that was when I realized that Dark Water Lake was deadly and not at all the London river in Charles Kingsley's novel "The Waterbabies" where Tom, the cruel, little chimney sweep had fallen in and drowned, only to be reborn as a waterbaby and live for quite a long while in the magical but sometimes harsh underwater world.  In the end, he made amends, was redeemed, and came back to being a landbaby.  Listening to Uncle Willie and Sparrow, I came to understand that Dark Water wasn't like that - if you drowned, you died - there was no undersea kingdom, no redemption, no chance to put things right.

Illusions.  Some we hand over with sadness, resignation, and a touch of grace.  Some we trip on, just in time to save ourselves from falling into the dark lake of expectation and false promises.  Some are roughly jerked out of our hands by old men sitting on porches.  We learn the best lessons by making mistakes and Sparrow was right, it don't take no books.  None of it kept me from walking in the woods with the dogs or watching the leaves drift downstream to die, but I did look at Dark Water Lake a little differently from then on.  And with time, I came to see people, including myself, as having surfaces and depths and mysterious things going on in both.