Benny’s Wild Rose Market is the only grocery in town. It sits on the corner of a four-door strip mall next to an empty storefront that used to be Second Hand Rose, a consignment clothing shop my boyfriend Will tells me was uncanny in its ability to produce from its well-worn racks the very thing you wanted.
As a fifth-grader, he walked in and pulled out a Packers jersey from a bin. This is unsurprising, given the territory, but what was amazing - not to say divinely comedic - was that this particular jersey bore the name and number of Gilbert Brown, a defensive lineman also known as “The Gravedigger”—something I deduce is related to the fact that he weighs 340 pounds, or so Google tells me. Will, a self-described prawn at the age of ten, was delighted by the find. Not only did he love the team, but the jersey, evoking the brawn of a man whose contemporary Burger King campaign featured Brown with a triple-decker sandwich in one hand and a pan-head shovel in the other, fit perfectly the Oliver Twistesque contours (straight lines) of Will’s pre-pubescent frame.
“There were two moth-holes in the collar about the size of kidney-beans.” The fog of ardor upon him, he remembers its only flaw.
The name Gilbert was equally magical. Out of all the players on the Packers line-up, it was Gilbert that he drew from the pile. A Gilbert jersey at Gilbert Lake, a ten minute drive from Wild Rose and the idyllic site of his family’s much-loved summer vacation home. These coincidences, especially during childhood, are not to be taken lightly.
On his dad’s side, Will’s family is a large and predominantly Northern-Irish clan of aunts, uncles and cousins presided over by his grandparents Jo and Jim who built a home on Gilbert Lake in early 1969. The house itself was a build-it-yourself prototype, a new-fangled ‘house in a box’ predating the age of Ikea. Once assembled, it became the family’s holiday retreat, complete with a mailbox with the family name in neat, hand-lettered paint on its side. Among other memories, Will’s father recalls watching the moon landing on a TV in the house’s brand new sitting room, the smell of new carpet mingling with the annunciation of Armstrong’s powdery footprint.
We enter Benny’s, where two cashiers who look related welcome us into the fluorescently lit, linoleum-scented shop. We pick up things to eat at the lake; cucumbers and salt and vinegar chips. Now and again we pass someone in the aisle and they pause, look up from whatever they’re holding and say hello. As usual, this practice of basic politeness moves me, cold east coaster that I am. I start to browse the cheese section, sizing up the Kraft singles and parcels of Tillamook cheddar, when Will steers me to another, smaller refrigerated section where stacks of what look like orange Kleenex boxes languish in a misted frost. Though I don’t want to, I am obliged to admit that I recognize these obelisks to be cheese.
Dear reader, I love cheese. All kinds. Haven’t met a cheese I didn’t like. And yet I am repulsed by these vacuum sealed blocks that look, in their plasticine sleeves, like Brutalist dairy renderings of the DMV, slightly oily and unnaturally dense. Small signposts announce the origin of each block with names like “Chain O’ Lakes” and “Waupaca”. When Will asks me to choose the one I want, I feel like he’s asking me to select an eel from the tank of an Elizabethan food cart. The local color is too strong for me! I quake!
We reach Gilbert Lake via a stream of tangled back roads flanked by leagues of deep woods. Leaving town, we pass an Aldi and it looks bizarre, a neatly proportioned time capsule bearing down upon its corner of country. In the shade of the trees, the artifacts of the present feel strangely like objects of the future.
The house is more or less how I had imagined it: one-story and paneled with blue siding. The lawn is clover-choked. Inside, the rooms smell like camping blankets and the thick, dry scent of pressed wood cabinetry carries from the kitchen. Will opens the several windows of the sunroom and discreetly, green smells invade. We dust the kitchen lightly, and almost immediately—our bags are still in the car, our jackets still on— we begin to make grilled cheeses.
The slicing of the cheese falls to me. I hazard some eye contact with my obelisk, sweaty with condensation after the perilous trip from the Benny’s freezers. Slipping the blade of a paring knife under the wrapping, I gut one of the seams and the plastic lifts like skin, sort of like opening the world’s floppiest, sweatiest can. We butter the bread, we grease the pan. We fry the bastards! I eat three and feel close to the grave. They’re delicious. The cheese is the very best cheddar I may ever taste, combining the velveteen creaminess of dairy straight from the udder with the acidic punch of a champagne vinegar or a stepped-on tequila lime.
At the bottom of a set of red-stained stairs that bridge the steep hill between the house and lake, I am confronted with the water for the first time. Standing on a biologically unstable strip of ‘land’ that exists between the stairs and the dock, everything feels interstitial, everything water-logged. The ground beneath me sinks, curling wetly over the edge of my Birks. In my youth, I was a nature girl. Lately, I have been finding, I am not.
Will’s delight at returning is tainted with shock. I quickly learn that extreme change has altered the lake of his memories. Everything about this place used to be different. The flank of marshland into which I am being steadily absorbed (even the soil structure appreciates the value of a Mid-Western pace) was once a white-sand beach that transitioned into a four-foot bed of smooth, round stones where the waves would break. His grandparents liked to set two Adirondack chairs against the woods and watch their grandkids play for hours, sometimes lighting a firepit as dusk fell. Now the beach is desiccated, dark and flecked as potting soil and overrun by flora of the aquatic variety. The stones that protected the land from erosion are under water, a cobbled wall pickled by clots of algea and blurred with scum.
Within the past six months, the water levels at Gilbert Lake have risen several feet. The short explanation for this troubling phenomenon is that Gilbert Lake is another small casualty of global warming. The increased intensity of each season (I tip my cap to the greenhouse effect) means that the ice that blanketed Wisconsin last winter lasted longer than usual, and in the brief, weakening spring, had very little time to melt. When summer heat struck sooner and harder than it ordinarily should, the ice began to melt all at once instead of gradually, resulting in a flood of new lake water that would have otherwise slowly evaporated as spring matured into summer.
Such a change is startling and impossible to ignore. The environmental shift has rotted docks, submerged boathouses, eroded land and threatened homes. As it stands, Gilbert Lake is no longer suitable for boating or water sports. Any kind of boating that creates a wake is prohibited in the interest of preserving properties menaced by the encroaching water. Speed boats that cost upwards of fifty-thousand dollars bob, unused, at the foot of million-dollar summer homes. Landscaped hillsides that once bore patios are drowned and turned to marsh. Among a cache of dying birch trees, the remains of a dock with a child’s high-chair still attached molder like a shipwreck.
As a result, tourism in the area has plummeted, with only the most dedicated families returning to honor their summer traditions—sans the much beloved water-skiing. Today, though the sky is sunny, the air bright and the breeze strong, there is almost no one on the lake.
Ten yards out on the water, each house maintains a square of floating dock known in the local vernacular as a “raft”. In the past, Will says, the entire circumference of the lake would quicken with the island life of the rafts. Unattainable and formidable older sisters tanned with earbuds in, fathers napped with hats tented over their faces, cousins wrestled on their astro-turf surfaces, tossing lighter opponents screaming into the water.
Will describes day-long games of “King of the Raft” which he routinely lost to his older cousin, Jimmy. There’s a moment, we agree, when someone throws you off a dock into water when you inexplicably believe that you still have the power to return to where you stood a moment ago. It keeps you returning for more, this giddy illusion, caught in a suspension of air, feeling like you could manipulate gravity with the strength of your disbelief. Today, the rafts form a wavering, deserted circle on the lake’s glycerin surface, the ambassadors of a pointed emptiness.
Still, as soon as he finishes our brief tour of the lakefront, Will can resist no longer. He strips and lowers himself into the waist-deep (once ankle-deep) water that murmurs at the back of the dock where trees meet land. Silver-sided fish scatter in the wake of his movement. I stoop at the edge of the rocks, sinking further into a loam of algae and stocky reeds. The lake water is a cloudy, mercurial green. Clear when cupped, I run it back and forth between my hands and it leaches a mineral scent of deep earth.
The day passes like this with Will swimming emphatically to and from the raft, returning occasionally to the dock to talk to me. I stay fixed to the planks and refuse to get in the water, saying things like, “but I’m cold,” and “I’m getting a third grilled cheese”. Eventually, Will gives up and I move into one of the Adirondack chairs left by his grandparents and start eating apples and bourgeoise almond butter from a squeezable tube.
I’m not entirely sure what’s stopping me from plunging in. True, the water is icy and I’m wraithlike, ridiculously susceptible to the various degrees of hypothermia. Maybe it’s the swaying links of braided plants just visible under the water’s surface, serpentine as the currents wrack them. Or perhaps the plush lakebed and its microbiological menagerie of bacterial silt that plumes upward at the touch like dust-mote geysers. I’m just happy to sit and watch
Eventually, my presence is either forgotten or accepted by the surrounding fauna and I am permitted to keep silent company with the lake critters. The dramatic increase in the water levels has brought with it the proliferation of mosquitoes, slick-backed frogs and colonies upon colonies of dragonflies. Like most people, I’m predisposed to appreciate the latter. Their aesthetic kinship with the ever-dreamy butterfly and their species-specific taste for the cleanest water sources make dragonflies as welcome as any insect could hope to be. In my hometown of Reston, Virginia, naturalists keep a yearly dragonfly count as an indication of the area’s water purity. For the past two summers the numbers have boomed.
Here, the dragonflies are attracted to everything. Movement, people. Will’s freckles. The teal latex of the inner-tube is a particularly potent aphrodisiac. They couple and cling to it, bodies flimsy as psyllium husk, a blue bead lighting at the end of each tail.
I can’t help but perceive beneath their delicate beauty a distinct and apocalyptic edge. Might these be the gorgeous, instagrammable locusts that precede the beginning of the end? Their discarded carapaces litter the banks of the lake, speaking to an adaptational readiness that lies beyond humans, at least for now. At night, I imagine, they fill the earth with a kind of rattle.
As evening falls, Will paddles to the opposite bank to return a kayak to the house of a family friend. I watch him begin the swim back with a trickling note of panic. The slight, stirring current flows against him. His limbs as they wheel through the water thrash white. I call out intermittently, “are you okay?”, but every time my voice seems to miss him and his head, seal-like, dips under.
The lake is deserted except for a lone pontoon boat with an older couple at the helm, their features cowled by visors. Standing at the edge of the water, Will’s oversize shirt flapping open, hands on my hips, I wonder if the people on the boat think I’m his mother, worrying. I wave to acknowledge them. They wave back. They are the only ones who have heard my question. They watch his progress, too.
Something people keep saying to me is: people from the Midwest are so nice, and: they take things slow. They’ve got the measure. They enjoy, they process, they move through, absorbing without lingering. I find this to be true when our server at the Two Lakes Supper Club lists the salad dressings with placidity and a cadence as of the Lord’s Prayer. She’s worked at Two Lakes for seven years, and though it’s not her favorite, not once has the orange roughy special (lemon and tartar) been sent back to the kitchen. The relish platter we ordered and which we ask after, plagued by our east coast impatience, takes, she tells us, a “long time” to prepare. We learn that the woman who makes the relish platters is responsible for all of the restaurant’s antipastos and spends her dinner shift selecting, by hand, each black olive, splitting the carmine carrots, dishing dill sauce, arranging the gentile cherry peppers so that they draw the eye in pyramids slick with oil.
I am willing to be patient with things when I believe the results will be beautiful. I’ll walk the long way home to catch the sunset, allow paint to dry before adding another coat. In Wisconsin, patience is of the natural order, beauty a collateral effect of things done right. When the platter arrives, it is just what the menu describes. We dismantle it, brine and root-sugar, dill bright on the palate. Someone has taken their time with this gift, and this fact tempers our hunger, slows our consumption.
Will reaches the raft. Resting his arms on the metallic tanks that keep it afloat, I can read the relief in his body. The couple on the boat, satisfied of his safety, have turned away and head for the sun, blistering as it begins to fall on the other side of the lake. I watch as Will hauls himself up by the ladder and stands, drenching the raft’s acid-stained carpet.
“Look up!” he says.
I do, and above, the sky is cloudbursting. Cistine, vaulting, the clouds have broken apart and condensed in individual patches of cotton-tail white. The result is that the sky looks like desertified soil or shattered pottery held together by luminary blue filigree.
I look at Will, skygazing, balancing, his wide-stance unassuming—and think, there’s something King of the Raft about it. I suck the rest of my almond butter out of its plastic tube. He motions for me to get in, to join him on the waltzing raft. We leave in an hour. This is my last chance to throw caution and germaphobia to the wind, to reap the circulatory benefits of the water’s lush freeze.
I shake my head—I won’t. He shrugs. My loss.
Without looking, he jumps.
