A day on the shore of Lake Erie

I sit and the sky rolls by in layers of white and blue and shadows. The depth is brought out by the morning sun. The sound is captured in the wind and delivered like rolling thunder although it is only the wind. The day is strong in both meaning and moment. The water races and rolls up in a hurry only to turn over and crash. The splash of it all falls all around. I'm by myself in the moment, even though a small boy is nearby fishing as his mother reads a book under the shade of a tree. He is in blue shorts and her long, blond hair falls out of her blue ballcap. The notebook I write in sits on my lap and the wind blows the pages back like an old Walt Disney animation and thoughts fill my head. Lake Erie is a gift to me. It is my muse. In Greek mythology, the muses were goddesses believed to inspire art and literature. I believe we all have a place we go when we need to be inspired or comforted or reminded of what is right and simple and usually, we find it right in front of us. An older man sits on the bench above the water. His hair is full and gray. His sunglasses don't let me in as I walk by. He is alone. I wonder why he sits alone. I wonder if he is OK. The sound dominates. The wind and the water. There is nothing else in the air but the sound and even still, it is quiet. My wife both acknowledges and finds humor in my obsession. "How was the lake today, sweetie?" she asks. "Was the sunrise pretty? Sunset? Is the water blue?" "Too many people," is my sometimes response. "They steal my silence." She laughs and chides my grumpiness. The sky turns grumpy. The water, once blue as Bermuda, is now gray. The water is a reflection of the mood of the sky. Lake Erie now looks like what I think the North Sea must be, although I've never been. My camera yearns as it waits for my pen to stop writing. My tools of creative expression are in a competition for my attention. Each wants to be used to capture the scene that plays in front of me as if it were being viewed on a theater screen, only Lake Erie is real. She is also a tease. She is moody. She reveals only when she is ready. She is in total control. She can be both warm and cold. She is mysterious and dangerous and I find myself intoxicated by her beauty, always. The pictures you see in this story were taken over only one day. They are not a collective of seasons or years but just one single day. Thursday. The water runs into the coast and explodes to the sky. The morning sunlight hits the droplets in flight and turns the spray into a kaleidoscope of color right before my eyes. By evening, the light will fall in the west but the lake's rolling water is still strong and the sound is still deafening as the water pounds the rocks. The spray is now backlit as it dances in front of the sky and the sky is now red, orange, purple and blue. I notice. My gaze gets lost. A little girl sits next to her mom not far from me. She saw the spray split into colors too. Her small hand holds her phone as she makes a memory of it all. All of us are uncomfortably using the concrete breakwall on the beach to secure our position as the water bubbles up as it arrives at our feet and then retreats back into the lake, leaving behind smooth, wet sand, erasing what was before and offering a blank page to write what is next. There are tiny pebbles too. Fragments of something once much bigger and they lie on the wet sand as individual pieces but in the collective of the moment cast in magical light, they reflect like red gemstones. I say to anyone within earshot of my voice, "aren't we lucky to live so close." My youngest daughter's friend lives in Connecticut. They were college roommates at Ohio State. She visited this week. I took her to see the sunset. She lives near the Long Island Sound. She's not easily impressed by the wind and the water and the setting sun, yet she said, "If I lived here, I'd be down here every night." It's time to go. The sun said goodbye nearly 30 minutes ago but I linger. I always linger. It is quiet now. The moment is more organic than it has been all day. The darkness has yet to win but even when it does, I can still hear her, Lake Erie. Lake Erie brings me peace. I can close my eyes and fall asleep in its presence. I walk away for now. I'll be back tomorrow. Contact Ron Jantz at rjantz@chroniclet.com.