There is nothing like a summer evening on a lake in Northern Michigan. I try to spend time every year at my parents cottage on a lake near Traverse City. My daughter was married this past weekend, and it was great to relax at the cottage after the ceremony.
The evening was beautiful after the heat of the day, and I decided to do a little cross training. The lake is small enough to swim across and back without too much effort. The water a perfect temperature.
I love to swim at night, but I do admit to some uneasiness about something grabbing at me from the depths! True, no monsters likely living in an inland lake, although I had spotted a very large snapping turtle by the dock earlier in the day. Those Northern Pike have some sharp teeth also! I decided that swimming trunks were in order.
I dove into the water, and floated for a few minutes on my back. The stars are brilliant away from the city, and the trees were reflected on the water under the light of the moon. I could feel the stress of the wedding leaving me, and I turned to begin a nice easy crawl toward the other shore.
Perfect moments are rare, but this was one of them, and I flipped over to my back to stretch it out. Just as I did so a buzz came out of the night past my face. Shit! What is a horse fly doing out at night! The fly began diving runs at my head, soon joined by two more companions. These were monster flies, and my body remembered the large welts delivered in years past. I dive under the water and swim several strokes hoping to loose the flies, but there they are waiting as my head popped up. The trick is to let them land and then smack them before they can bite you. One of them fell to that tactic, but as you can imagine it takes a little courage to allow the landing.
My meditative state is of course blown out the window. General anxiety is rising and I’m wondering if snapping turtles swim around at night. When I was a kid I would allow a snapper to bite at a stick, and then see how long it would hold on. Certain appendages went into protective mode as I sped up my swimming stroke. This was turning into a workout! The flies intensified their fly overs looking for tender skin. I changed tactics and flipped to my back, my ass to the depths and just the oval of my face breaking the water.
I slowly kicked to shore thinking philosophically that my swim reflected my life at times. Horse flies above and Snappers below.
