May 27, 2020
We drove to Spectacle Lake this morning. I saw it on the Victoria subreddit. Twenty minutes north on the Trans Canada, left on Whittaker, and drive to the end. Avoid the crowds of Thetis or Durrance.
Turning down Whittaker I return to my past: driftwood fences decorate hippy hobby farms speckled with remnant fruit trees, chicken coops, and a lurking peace; overgrown cut-blocks with canopies of electrical transmission lines; then a trailer home decomposing within a copse of old-growth, a few wrecked cars and sadness; further two new build on subdivided clear-cuts, half-acre estates of gravel and heat; of course, a few requisite 70’s split-levels with retired folk who used to endure the commute and now stay home and walk the dog.
The parking lot is empty and you don’t have to pay. You’ll pass those few older people with even older dogs as you walk the access road down to the lake, about a hundred meters. The road turns into a path that continues around the lake, but we stopped at the steep, gravelly outcrop with two picnic benches they call a beach.
My partner laid chatting with an old friend visiting from Golden. Our daughter wandered in tight circles exclaiming:
“Birdie!”
“Turtle!”
“Doggie!”
After taking some restless pictures of the sedate clouds, I lay on the picnic table bench.
I held my hat above my face and twirled it from the brim, observing, and then anticipating, the pleasant way it assumed different shapes. Minutes passed without thought. I was wasting my time: that was the first thought that occurred to me as I lay submerged in peace. What should I be doing? The answer to that was the same one I had been flagellating myself with for more than decade: writing, reading if not writing, at the very least thinking. (What I find practically is this type of thinking is more of an agitating; a vibrating anxiety that is nothing more).
I wanted to stay with peace. I considered why I felt peaceful (and this laborious syntax reflects the action of my mind at this point, a careful stumble).
Then: of course, my adolescence; days spent on beaches just like this, recreational areas hacked from a second or third growth forest; gravel dumped by dump truck and now called a beach; two or three picnic tables with at least one rotting plank that is always secretly spongy with water and gets your butt wet; a gravel parking lot at the end of a rural-residential road; one or two old-growth trees, survivors of when this was an actual forest. A few fishermen in pontoon boats drifting a hundred meters offshore; sunscreen, hats, balls, dogs chasing sticks and shaking nasty mutt-water all over your stuff; the process of holding open your underwear so your foot won’t leave smears of wet sand; the similar process of then flossing the sand from between your toes and balancing on one foot while trying to pull on your sock and then fit it into your shoe.
I would have preferred to read about the beach. To enjoy the place through a consciousness who appreciated the water lapping their skin. The sun which couldn’t burn. A lake which supported their body. A person who didn’t feel as if they would drown at all moments as they flailed their limbs to stay afloat. For whom nothing lurked in the shallow depths, a monster unleashed from an underground lair by an earthquake!
What I wanted was mediation, everything filtered, ordered, and safe. I couldn’t bear the world mentally, sure, but even physically: my weak blue eyes squinted against the sun under which I burned instantaneously; allergies for most trees, grasses, and flowers; my fat, tiny body was meant to recline and experience the world through another. My consciousness only perceived a meagreness. (If I see clearly today, I see with the eyes of the dead).
I was such an angry kid. Unable to explain what I have just described, I complained. I whined. I learned to enjoy everyone’s disdain for a moaner. To feel special, the only one who doesn’t like the lake, who doesn’t like the sun, who understands we aren’t in nature, the stumps of the ancient trees gravestones for the forest which was here, not this choked tree farm: I believed I could see what nobody else could. That this defined genius, so therefore I had to always see the opposite.
My daughter is currently obsessed with turtles, and she spent quite a bit of time squatting by the edge of the lake looking for the glimmer of their shells. I want her to enjoy life. To find her own way and not define her vision in opposition to everyone, but neither to follow. To enjoy not the reflection of a thing, but the thing itself.
I’m reminded of Larkin, “[I’m] enjoying life as far as its my character to do so.”
Today, at least, I found peace within the waters of moments I didn’t enjoy.
