Sea Story Snippet: No great lake
Wednesday, November 3, 2010 at 1:36AM 
Lake Michigan, summer 2007
As I've mentioned, I'm writing a collection of sea stories. (I'm also calling it a lyric memoir about a spiritual journey told through seascapes. But that's a mouthful. So mostly I just say "sea stories.")
This is a sea story snippet, a little peek, a snapshot, a tiny first draft.
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A lake, no matter how great, is no ocean.
I've seen three of the Great Lakes: the choppy little corner of Lake Erie that angles off the chimney at the top of Pennsylvania; Lake Ontario in Canada during my honeymoon to Niagara-on-the-Lake, which is not Niagara Falls; and the vast blue of Lake Michigan where it points down to Chicago. The Erie visit was a quick-stop drive-by just to say I'd seen it. From my vantage point all I saw was a largish lake, but nothing great. I don't remember much about Lake Ontario during my honeymoon. I may have been love drunk. Or wine drunk from all those luscious wineries.
But in Chicago I stood on a pier and stared at the endless blue horizon, willing myself to believe this was just as good as the sea. I thought a Great Lake might be able to fool me, despite my loyalty to the ocean. I wondered if I were a fickle enough lover to find the same sweetness in a landlocked body of water as I find at the open coast. But it's salt I crave, not sweetness. The expanse of blue on blue is enough to lure me in, to make me think that this could be the real deal.
But no. I ache for the rough and tumble, the crash and hiss of water fighting its way in to shore and back to the sea. The lake just sat there, sometimes lapping sweetly at the shoreline or pier. There was no breeze to soothe the humid air. That same soggy air smelled like damp duck feathers, like the down comforter my husband and I bought for our first apartment, the one I had to take back before we ever slept underneath it because all I could say every time I walked into the room was, "It smells like a damn lake in here."
Lakes smell gamey, like decaying waterfowl--a fetid cattail and heron smell. Lakes smell like dead fish with no salt to preserve them. The ocean smells of death too, of crustaceans boiled in the salt sun and left to bake on the sand; of tangled seaweed and jellyfish snarled on shore. Ocean death is briny, sharp with a pleasant tang. Lake death is waterlogged, bloated, like old rubber gone bad. Lakes drain me. But the ocean, she fills me up.
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