Wave Lives

There is a stillness before the sun rises, when the sky transforms into shades of navy, lilac and orange. The wind barely blows, and the gentle puffs of our breath disturb the air as my dad and I make our way from the car to the beach, weaving through paths surrounded by prairie grass and blooming black-eyed Susans. Waves caress the shoreline, not crashing but raking the sand and rocks with each push and pull. They land as a metronome, a slower, deeper pace than our breathing. I am not surprised that the lake moves with greater depth than the two of us. Lake Michigan is more ocean-like than lake. At over 22,000 square miles, it is the fifth largest lake in the world.

We take our shoes off when we reach the sand, and our feet sink into a grainy coldness. The sand on the shores of Lake Michigan is a rusty golden color, rough and sharp, with pieces of shell and rock that lodge between my toes and stick to the arches of my feet. Our destination is not the sand, though, but the large, rugged rocks—worn limestone slabs and glacial erratic boulders—that grace the shoreline. I begin the scramble, placing hands and feet on the cool and slippery surfaces to move from rock to rock, edging closer to the water.

I reach a rock that hangs out over the lake, slightly concave in the center, and settle in. My dad also finds his own rock, and we listen to the waves and the newly arrived gulls singing their morning song. The sun cracks the sky with a single line of fire above the clouds. From there, its ascent is rapid—moving above the horizon and casting a bridge of light that reaches across the water to the shore. I’m not religious, but mornings like this feel like a church—a glimpse of divinity, of something greater than the finite space I occupy on a daily basis. The gulls swoop amongst sun rays that reach out like tendrils.

Overcome space, and all we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now. My dad gave me Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull when I was a young girl, and I recall the words now. Space and time—the ultimate separators.

My dad also gave me a prophecy. From as young as I can remember, he told me he would die when he was forty-eight years old. It was the age his father died, so in my dad’s mind that was the time he was allotted. Forty-eight years. 17,532 days. 420,768 hours. I counted down on each birthday, contemplating—and fearing—what a world without my father in it would be like.

As it turns out, his was an ill-founded prophecy. When we sit on the rocks, I am thirty years old and my father is fifty-nine. He thinks he is living on borrowed time. I still live in fear of when.

Over 1.2 billion years ago, two tectonic plates separated and created the Mid-Continent Rift. As time passed, the deep grooves became filled with melting glacier water, eventually creating freshwater lakes. One of these became Lake Michigan. My siblings and I were raised drinking and bathing in its waters. It’s in our family’s blood. Its waves move within my body.

When the sun is fully formed, we leave the rocks to venture along the beach. My eyes scan the ground for sea glass, shells and heart-shaped rocks, objects my dad taught us to see as rare and sacred treasures. We pause at the ecotone where waves meet land, and feel the cold water rush across our toes and pull at our feet, asking us to enter.

In Lake Michigan, waves hit the shoreline at an average of every four seconds. At thirty years old, I have lived 236,520,000 waves. My dad has lived 465,500,000.

I don’t count the waves that day, to see how many land before we leave. I look instead at my dad, how the gray is slowly encroaching up past his ears to the top of his head, how the lines at the corners of his eyes remain long after he stops smiling. I wonder how many waves he has left, how many waves we have left together. The gulls circle overhead, squawking. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now.

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