Some Thoughts on Mortality and Magic

Water, water, see the water flow…Oh wizard of changes, teach me the lesson of flowing.

The Water Song, Incredible String Band

It’s a lesson I’m still struggling with, perhaps now more than ever. Although I have become an enthusiastic apologist for denial, reality leaps into my consciousness from time to time and leaves me by turns frightened and determined. Alone and afraid, alone and courageous. Alone. For more than half a century, I’ve been a partner, a wife. Over the decades our lives have become so entwined that it is difficult to know how we would disentangle them. But we’re old. Did I actually think we were immortal?

I’m thinking about this—and the insecurity that has taken over our lives since Jack’s diagnosis two years ago—as I sprawl on a rocky expanse overlooking Lake Superior. Uncertainty has never been easy for me, and when confronted with it I try to prepare by engaging my imagination, by role-playing possible outcomes—mostly bad—in various scenarios. I’ve always done this, whether the outcome to be feared is as trivial as an abscessed tooth or as dire as a possible cancer diagnosis. Jack calls it catastrophizing. I call it preparing for the worst.

Whatever it’s called, I’m engaging in it here, my body firmly supported by some of the oldest rock formations on earth, listening to the water lap against them, and staring up at a blue, blue sky. 

I am hiking along the lake with friends today. They have left me perched on this rock while they walk a little farther. Would I come here alone? Would I keep our little cabin by the lake? Could I figure out the plumbing by myself? Would I re-arrange the furniture? (And what does it say about me that I have a plan for that?) Would I still laugh and tease and share bad puns, or would I lapse into a sad and bitter old age? Would I…Will I? Jack is doing well now, but I can’t seem to stop my imagination from spiralling downward.

And then. With the heat of the rocks warming my back, and a breeze off the water rustling the sparse grasses that poke out from mossy clumps, a feeling of sheer contentment overtakes the catastrophizing, reminding me that this lake can still calm my soul. 

I don’t remember my first glimpse of it. It may have been when friends visited us shortly after we moved to the farm. They arrived with kayaks atop their car—a common sight now, but a rarity then. They had heard about the sand beach at Batchewana Bay, an hour’s drive north. We spent a pleasant afternoon there, but I don’t recall experiencing the sense of wonder that I’ve come to associate with Lake Superior.

Sometime later—the precise chronology is unimportant—I travelled a bit farther north with friends to spend a day on another beach, this one featuring the smooth, multi-coloured stones that are common on the lake’s many bays, and with dramatic rock outcroppings defining the periphery of this small cove. It was a beautiful spot, but I was preoccupied with watching my toddlers and visiting with my friends.

It wasn’t until we began spending days, and then weeks, camping as a family along the shore, that I began to feel Mishipeshu, Ojibwe spirit of the lake, creep into the marrow of my bones. 

“This is where God lives, if there is a god,” I said, still open to that possibility.

Those were the years of running a family farm, holding down jobs, concerns about children’s behaviour or academic success, and—for me—constantly second-guessing the life I led and the choices I’d made. No different, I suppose, from the lives of most. Easier than the lives of many. 

At the campground, we were just one family among many with tents or pop-up trailers pitched in spacious campsites. This was not wilderness camping. Children rode bicycles on the mile-long road that followed the pebble beach, couples walked their dogs, families scurried up the boulders and headlands that marked the edge of the campground, and teenaged dare-devils leapt into the frigid water from the rock cliffs. On some evenings, we walked to the visitors’ centre to see films or nature presentations, then returned to sit around the campfire roasting marshmallows. It was the stuff of a million North American summer holidays.

Except for the magic. And here I stumble, because I don’t know how to put the magic into words. 

Photos hang on the walls of my memory. A perpetually angry child softens and sits in stillness on the rocks. An adolescent, leans against a log, wrapped in a blanket, staring into the vastness. A small child throws pebbles into the water, watching the expanding ripples.

Sometimes it comes quietly. A mist drifting across the water, an improbable pine growing from a crack in the rocks, the lull of waves lapping against the beach, the expansive view of water interrupted by majestic headlands, one after another, fading into the distance, an ancient, petrified echo. And sometimes it comes in with a roar as storms gather over the water and turn the lake into an angry inland sea. The fury of Mishipeshu. However it arrives, it carries with it the power to transform my chronic catastrophizing into acceptance of whatever the moment holds. It sucks out tension and replaces it with a calm wonder. 

It was that small pine tree that spoke most loudly to me. Summer after summer, I left the campsite behind and scrambled up the headland at the end of the campground. A dozen long steps up, over jutting rocks, around the rock face and along a narrow, moss-lined path worn bare by decades of campers, to a huge, smooth rock surface where I perched, knees pulled close to my chest, gazing at the blue expanse, sometimes smooth as glass, sometimes sparkling with small ripples, sometimes crashing in breaking waves, throwing up spray. I was more often than not alone, although occasionally I interrupted an embracing couple or was interrupted by a gaggle of ten-year-olds. Invariably, as I stared down at the lake, I sang under my breath: Teach me the lesson of flowing. 

I didn’t sing to the tree, but if the water was a wizard of changes, the tree was a wizard of steady, sturdy resilience—a white pine, bent away from the water by the prevailing wind, stunted by the meagre nourishment its roots could garner from the small rock crevice. Not much bigger than a seedling, but with old gnarled branches and coarse bark. How long, I wondered, had it been here? On my annual visits, over two decades, it seemed unchanged. I haven’t visited that spot for many years now, since our family camping days ended. I wonder if my tree is still there, if I’d recognize it, if others also marvel at its resilience. 

Of course, resilience is everywhere, as is magic. Stunted trees struggle out of crevices all along the lakeshore—pines, spruces, birches. There is magic wherever the timeless pulls us away from the fears and anxieties that fill our quotidian lives. For me, it is here, on this rock and rocks like it, my body pressed against a surface smoothed by millennia of glaciers and moving water, listening to the lake trying, once again, to teach me the lesson of flowing.