#11-Returning to the Water’s Edge

"Now, I return to those places where time softens, and the weight of the world slips off my shoulders like water from sun-warmed skin."

Dear Reader,

One can tell a lot about a lake by observing the weeds on its shorelines. They give clues about what species of fish the lake might harbor. They give clues to what the substrate is like beneath the surface and what aquatic insects might be burrowing below.

The lakes that lack much of any floating or emergent vegetation perhaps are bog stained or rocky or both. Few species of plants find refuge in the rocky Canadian shield lakes of northeastern Minnesota. Where the waters are darkened by dissolved tannins that reduce light penetration and ancient rocks that lie thick beneath the surface.

But what about other lake weeds and what can they tell us? Bullrush is one. Common along shorelines across the state and sometimes in the middle of bays. If you see stands of them one can bet that below is a sandy bottom not more than six feet from the surface.

They extend out of the water like so many long green whiskers, about the diameter of a pencil, two to three feet high and narrowing to a point at their ends. The longer ones have a certain bend to them as if holding some great weight of the world. Reed spiders abound in their midst and many a paddler has received a face full of spider web when traveling amongst them.

Often enough, various submerged pond weeds lie at the outer edges of bullrush forming dense patches. Semi-permeable membranes that slow the flow of insect and fish activity into and out of the bullrush. Like they are life-size depictions of the barriers of bodily cells.

Yet, they too are conducive to supporting animal life and do so well enough. Many a northern pike have ambushed prey on either side of pond weed patches. Pike are like antioxidants of the inland seas, the cleaners up of free radicals and toxins unfit for the survival of the whole organisms itself–of which is the lake.

Where the bullrush meets the sandy shores there lies a kingdom of its own. A peculiar place that hosts a variety of subjects. This is a favorite haunt of many a green frog. Whose kind thrives in the protection the reedy stalks provide. These are their hunting grounds and hunting is good for there is food aplenty amidst the bullrush in the shallows and the leafy shrubs that form a border between lake and woods.

In these places one may find green frogs of all shapes and sizes. Younger ones the size of a nickel and larger ones nearly as round as baseballs. They dodge in and out of the tall green stalks. Sometimes hopping into the lake where they craftily disappear and sometimes diving headlong into the cattails or manna grass that lines the shore. There they feed on reed spiders and black flies and other similar tasty morsels.

In the early summer, one might find other visitors lurking in the shallows of the lake. Black and brown bullhead young often school up and linger amongst the bullrush, sometimes in water as shallow as a few inches. Their curvy bodies and short “whiskers”, called barbels, make them look like miniature catfish, which they in fact are. Bullheads are ictalurids which are a family of catfish native to Minnesota.

When I was a kid, before I knew about ictalurids and percids and the overall scientific names of things, I remember watching a school of young bullheads swim around and beneath my grandparent’s dock. I decided I wanted to hold one so I grabbed a small net and scooped up a dozen or so and dumped them into a bucket of lake water. Watching them completely entranced me. I think watching them swim helped forge my admiration for not only fish and lakes but all of the outdoors. This world, I found, was full of tiny miracles at every turn.

Out there on the dock, in the shallows of the lake, was a place that didn’t hold back the truth. What I saw and observed was real, and wild, and pure. There were no filters. Out there, on the dock, in the shallows of the lake, was a place I felt fully alive. When I got older, somewhere along the line, I forgot to notice those tiny miracles and, as a result, the spice of life kept drifting in the wind ahead of me, always just out of reach.

But now I have remembered. Now, I return to those places where time softens, and the weight of the world slips off my shoulders like water from sun-warmed skin. A place where I can remember who I was before the noise—before the world asked me to be anything else.

Who were you before the world asked you to be anything else?