I meet Lake Superior when I am ten. My father takes my brother and me to Picnic Rocks in Marquette, Michigan, and I haul my new snorkel set, bulky and awkward and bright pink, under my arms. Dad carries the towels; Peter has his own snorkel mask and fins. They fit a bit nicer in the security of his lanky limbs. We set up camp in the warm sand thirty yards down the beach from the car, lay our towels and sandals on the slow slope.
The rocks that give the beach its name sit in the water: a set of three black boulders, lichen-covered and seagull-festooned. 1986 is painted in red and white on the largest of the rocks for the high school reunion. I love the rocks because they are black, because they are named Picnic, because they have been colored in paint and droppings and moss.
“It’s going to be cold,” Dad calls to us as we rush toward the blue.
We run in anyway. When our legs hit the water and the cold, we try to stop but the lake trips our feet and we fall in.
Lake Superior closes over my head only briefly before I kick up from the sand-bottom. My mouth grabs at the air but my lungs won’t inhale. Peter is next to me, hair spiky with water.
Dad wades in more cautiously. Knowingly. “You guys okay?”
My breath back, I say, “Yep.”
Later, while Dad takes a break on the beach to read his Newsweek, Peter and I take our snorkel sets to the water’s edge. There is a rock-bed in about eight and a half feet of water. We are going hunting.
There is a book back at the rental house with all the different types of rocks found in the lake. Peter is looking for agates, fools’ gold, conglomerates that are not concrete chunks. These are considered rare. I find I like sandstone best. Sandstone has been compressed under the weight of water and waves. There is a lot of sand, so there is a lot of sandstone, but I don’t mind that my rocks are common. I like that I can feel the granules. On land I trace the striations of color around the body of the stones: rust and eggplant and squash. They are not always round, but they are always soft-edged: they take on the shapes of the cliffs, of the boulders called Picnic, of the waves that rolled them. Hard and soft all at once.
We return to this beach the next year when I am eleven. Dad says we should swim out to the black rocks. We leave our snorkel masks and fins on our towels.
Peter does not like the deep water, does not like swimming in lakes. There is no control out here. But we go together anyway, headed toward the middle of the three. Dad never takes us to the far-left rock. Peter and I don’t question this decision.
We are only about ten yards away when I accidentally look down into the water.
“Daddy?”
“Yeah?”
“How much water are we swimming in?” Usually when I ask this question, Dad sinks down to the bottom and estimates the depth based on how long it takes to touch. But he doesn’t do that this time. He just looks down too.
“Thirty feet? Maybe a bit more?”
“How come I can see the bottom?” Below my feet, the lake floor is no longer sand. Replacing it are very large rocks, some the size of kayaks and ship anchors. They are all washed-out blues and greens and grays. Some of them look purple. They are all smooth and hard, without the fuzzy look that algae lends. Rocks are not as beautiful when I cannot hold them in my hand, worry myself over the curves of their creation.
It feels like looking over a cliff, suspended above the ground, floating on blue like some sort of cartoon. The mind only sees the distance to fall. Gravity doesn’t read.
I am frozen there, treading water, imagining my feet caught in one of the crags, unable to get it out. Stuck at the bottom of the lake.
“We have to keep moving, Martha.” Peter has already reached the rocks, anxiety propelling him in the direction of something solid.
“I’m scared.”
“We’ll swim on our backs for a while. How does that sound?” I do not hear the urgency in my father’s voice, but when I am older and know about the way water steals warmth, I will understand his desire to reach my brother.
“Okay.” I turn over and look up at the blue of the sky, feel my father swim next to me. My breathing slows as the lake buoys me up.
We reach the boulders with no other hiccups, and clamber up the slope, picking our way around the seagull droppings. The rocks are hot from the sun soaking into the black pores and our bare soles, in their discomfort, are short-strided. We reach the top of the first boulder and collectively stare over the edge. The water is fifteen feet below us, ripple-surfaced. I don’t see the soft current moving out. When I am eleven, there may not be any current at all, just water burbling against tiny islands. Quiet, still, and steady.
There is a ledge that is a little closer to the water and we scoot down on our butts. It is just like a diving board, I keep telling myself. But the sight of the boulders fifty feet down has me frozen again. Peter jumps in first. Heights do not frighten him. Even though he has no control in deep water, this kind of water is not scary to Peter. If he can see the bottom and know it is deeper than he can touch, and if he can see that nothing will grab him, then the lake is nothing but adventure.
Dad jumps in ahead of me, like we used to do when I was really little at the community pool. He would jump in first, and then tread water to the side of the diving board and wait for me to jump in. A safety net. I did not need him, but it was nice to know he was there.
I leap off the side, convinced by the heat of the rocks and the coaxing of my father and brother. The lake catches me. When I come up for air, Peter and Dad are waiting, and we swim the short distance to the next rock, which is much the same as the first, though bigger, and there are more seagulls squawking at us. Dad calls them rats with wings. But I like how sleek and clean they look: white-chested, gray-winged, black-and-yellow beaked. I think they are not so bad. Common, like my sandstone.
We walk across the ridge on the top of the boulder. When we reach the spot just above the red and white numbers, we make our way down off the rock, slide into the water, and swim back to the shallows.
In this moment, I am not afraid of the lake. I love the water more than I have ever loved anything. Lake Superior is big and cold and I lend her pronouns because she feels so alive to me. So permanent. And I think she will always be there to catch me.
She catches me when I am twelve, and thirteen, and fourteen. And she catches me and my father again when I am seventeen and we swim out to the reef just behind Picnic Rocks and perch ourselves on a submerged ledge.
I am changing. Everything is in flux, and my dad and I talk about the tennis season, and ACTs, and where I want to go to college, and what I’m going to study, but I do not tell him how nervous I am to be considering studio art for a major, or how nervous I am to be gay and going to college because what if I make the wrong choice. I do not tell my dad that, at seventeen, I don’t really talk about the gay thing because I haven’t learned how yet. We just leave it to the ether. I give all of my anxiety to the lake because she is a good listener and she is so large and has so much space to hold my worries. They are only a drop to her.
I end up going to college by the lake. In August, my parents drop me off at school. The summer is a warm one for the Upper Peninsula, and Dad and I go swimming once before my parents head back to Minnesota and leave me to settle into college life. We head to a different beach at Presque Isle, but the lake is the same here as she is at Picnic. The water is cold like I remember and the true blue of Crayola markers, and I look down wonderingly at the boulders below my feet and they are not scary anymore. She feels the same as she has always felt, and I am glad for this small piece of home.
In the first three weeks of the semester, four people drown. Three were swimming toward the reef behind Picnic Rocks where Dad and I were two years before. The wind was probably up. Little waves probably licked the students’ faces. Insistent. They may have tried to swim around the back of the biggest rock. But maybe the rocks were too slick to clamber up. Maybe the water pushed too hard and flushed them back toward the smaller boulders. Maybe their arms grew tired of fighting against the water and getting nowhere and maybe the cold seeped into their skin and there was no one to call to for help.
Warning flags in red mark the beach, but I keep swimming there because I know every inch of that stretch of sand and water. I have memorized the rock bed twenty feet out and where to build the best sandcastles and the way the beach is striped in sections of pebbles and sand and how in the middle of summer it is striped in a rainbow of beach towels and plastic coolers. This beach is more home than my dorm room. I tell myself I am not like those swimmers who went out late at night when the beaches were closed. I tell myself I’m not like those swimmers because I know dark water is so much harder to read. I love the lake and I know not to take advantage of her kindness. I tell myself this like the lake can know this also. But she can’t.
When I go swimming at Picnic on the last nice day of September in my freshman year, I float on my back, staring at the blue of the sky and the white puffy clouds. I like that I am back at the beach that feels so familiar. I want to call it mine. I am surprised when I stand up, realize I am pushed in line with the far-left boulder, the boulder we never went to as kids. We never swam in this part of the beach. I am closer to the parking lot than I am to my towel.
It is such a small thing—to be pushed so far off track. Doubts work like that, though: wheedle their way in and set up camp. I do not know how the lake could have changed. It feels like betrayal. Like too much change all at once: lake and school and strangers that are also my friends. I stare at the clear, glinting water lapping at my knees and walk out of the lake and I remember all those times my brother and I went body surfing. And though my mother never went to the beach with us, she was adamant we didn’t go any deeper than our knees so that when the waves washed back, our feet wouldn’t pull out from under us. She said something about rip currents then, and all I knew about them was that you had to swim parallel to shore and just keep swimming until you reached land or someone came to get you. But I learned that while watching the Discovery Channel. Mom always made sure Dad watched us when Peter and I went swimming in the waves to make sure we didn’t go too far out. Standing on shore, looking out at the rocks feels a little bit like the lake has become a stranger too. Or a friend I no longer recognize.
Picnic is closed to the public by the following year. Four people get stranded on the rocks, and the Coast Guard has to rescue them.
Cards are printed, emails are sent around to the campus population, posters are plastered on every bulletin board, lamp post, and free wall. Freshman orientation classes talk about respecting the lake. How it isn’t safe to swim at night, or during storms. There is so much we can’t see below the surface of the water.
The postcard that lands in all of our mailboxes shows an aerial photograph of the water at Picnic Rocks: navy and speckled white wave caps. There is no writing on the front of the card. None is needed. The white caps act as arrows and they rush out through the same channel that Peter, Dad, and I jumped into, and swam through, and climbed out of. Beyond the channel is nothing. Only miles and miles of water. how to swim out of a riptide is printed on the back.
I find new beaches to call home. Relearn Lake Superior’s body and my body and try to find the middle ground in all of it. But in the middle of a lake, there is no solid ground: only shit-covered boulders that in the heat of summer are slope-slicked with algae.
My mouth stumbles while talking about my body. I cling to “genderqueer” and bind my breasts, hoping to feel some sort of relief. It feels like rip currents the way I rush away from myself. Over the course of six months, I have two names and three different pronouns. And I research testosterone injections and talk to trans men about their transitions and can they still sing, and do they ever feel like something is missing. They all tell me the same thing: I am more myself now than I ever was pre-transition. But I am not sure that I feel that way. I cling to the label of trans the way I cling to the familiarity of the lake.
The lake’s sand is cold more often than it is warm, and I spend a lot of time sitting on the shore looking out over the still waters late in the evening. Lake Superior doesn’t do anything for the convenience of anyone else. She swallows ships and people and land, and I accept every part of her.
And I try to take note of the way she does not apologize for other people’s ignorance. She does not move out of anyone’s way. She is permanent in a way that my gender is not. She is cold always but freezes over less than once every fifteen years. I am trying not to freeze myself over. I don’t yet know how to be soft and hard at the same time. But Lake Superior is patient and she will wait for me.