Lake, Is an Oddity, a

¶ … Lake," is an oddity, a piece of spiritual writing that seems to be reflective of, particularly, traditional Christianity along Catholic/Episcopalian lines. And yet, unlike those branches -- or any branches -- of Christianity, it ends not with the promise of resurrection, but rather the existential assurance that this life is all there is. Nominally, the essay concerns White's return to a lakeside camp where he spent boyhood summers, this time bringing along his own son for the first time.

The Christian liturgy of the piece begins early: it is possible to view White and his son as priest and acolyte, especially as no other current family members are mentioned in the piece. All references to family are to White's birth family, not his son's siblings if any or mother.

By this device, too, White places the piece in the realm of gospel, of a writing about magical things that are past, but somehow are to live on through some sort of mystical revisiting, not unlike the mystical revisiting in the Roman Catholic/Episcopal Eucharist of the passion of Christ. For White, it is plain that the lake and its coves and streams and hills and camps and paths constitute a holy land, or, as he says, "this holy spot" (White, p. 104).

He continues to be transparent about his analogy, ending that same paragraph with a line that makes obvious both his worshipful attitude toward the place and the care he takes about it. Describing early morning paddles on the still, silent lake, he writes "I remembered being very careful never to rub my paddle against the gunwale for fear of disturbing the stillness of the cathedral" (White, p. 105).

White drops that reference out of the blue; his is a very much more sensual and less obvious way to compare the forest to a cathedral than one might expect from lesser craftsmen. Where others might have written "the tall cathedral of pine trees" or something similar, White leads up to his 'cathedral' image in a way that involves all the senses. He uses the scent of the lumber, the implied drippy noises of the set woods, which also have a scent. He uses visual imaged, implicit in the description.

He even uses touch, in the "cool and motionless" lake. Like a cathedral made of stone and stained glass, White's cathedral is many-faceted, meant to draw the participant and even the observer -- the reader -- into relationship with the holy, with God. As there is an eternality inherent in Christianity, so there is an eternality in White's lake. He says that plainly, too, and also creates the sense of the eternal through his prose.

He described feeling an illusion that he was his own father, and his son was he. "This sensation persisted," White writes, "cropping up all the time we were there....I seemed to be living a dual existence" (White, p. 105). The duality consisted in, however, a transcendence of generations, or, in short, the eternality one would find in Christian writings. By the end of that page, White is expressing a communion every bit as strong as the one suggested in Christian liturgies.

He and his son and the rod and the dragonflies are all one, all part of a single reality of which White is stunningly, almost achingly aware. He is also keenly observant, although much of his observation is bound together with longing. He laments the passing of the horse track up the dirt road, but without belaboring it as a sad fact of 'modern' life that the horse had disappeared from the work of country life; he accepts it as a natural progression, perhaps part of the divine plan.

But he is gratified that some things stay the same. The country girls, he says were the "same country girls, there having been no passage of time, only the illusion of it as in a dropped curtain...."(White, p. 106). This goes beyond religion into metaphysics, but he brings it back to a more understandable realm, the realm of the church service arguably, by noting that those 'same' waitresses had begun washing their hair frequently, in imitation of things they had seen in the movies.

By the end of the page, White has returned to the mystical, building an implied comparison to the entirety of Christianity to an almost musical crescendo: "Summertime, oh summertime, pattern of life indelible the fade proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweet fern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end...." (White, p. 106).

On the following page, White is immersed in memories of earlier times, times that bear a resemblance, in his retelling, of the early Christian ideas of community, everyone joyously committed to a single purpose, taking pleasure in seeing others of like mind, conducting the various rituals through which they were bound together. In a church, that might be singing, or 'witnessing' or participating in the celebration of the breaking of the bread, the reminiscence of the Last Supper.

At the lake, the ritual involves some eating, of course, but it involves fishing on the lake, a familiar metaphor in Christian thought to be sure. It involved conducting the parts of the ritual, from motoring boats to docking them, some of those tasks requiring the skilled hands of a 'priest' of the water. Participation in the ritual, and the ways of the ritual, were passed down from generation to generation, admitting of some changes in implements, from inboards to noisy outboards.

But some tings remained, such as getting soda pop up one's nose, watching turtles launch themselves into their world in the lazy sunlight. Still, toward the end of White's description of his visit to the 'holy well' of his youth, White is enmeshed in the illusion that he might be himself and also his son. Finally, White paints a baptismal scene; his son is about to be fully initiated in the ways of the lake by swimming in the lake with the other children lodging.