We found a precious place in the sand right out in the wind
And we lied under a blanket and heard the furious sound
The roar of waves, the pounding surf, two bodies on the earth
— The Microphones, “The Moon”
I grew up far away from water. My first memories are in Washington, but in Spokane, far away from Seattle or Puget Sound. I spent a few years in Wichita, but there was no romance in the Arkansas River. You can’t swim in it. I passed summers in the Florida panhandle, but Destin beaches are touristy, and I never felt any closer to the water than that.
There was a reservoir in the middle of Altus, my actual hometown, but I started associating the words reservoir and stagnant with each other at an early age. When I was eight or so, I took a class called “Pond Scum and Water Critters” at the community college, and I collected biological samples from the reservoir. I learned to use a microscope, and I also learned I should definitely stay out of the reservoir water. The reservoir is a town fixture, right next to the community center, replete with walking trails and tree cover. People get married there sometimes. But I couldn’t get past the word stagnant, or the geese guarding trash bins along the trails.
I wanted to fall in love with water. The Chicago shore of Lake Michigan, California beaches, Puget Sound. As a kid, I spent a lot of time on Wikipedia pages for coastal towns: Point Roberts, Washington. Juneau, Alaska. Tromsø, Norway. I wanted to spend autumn mornings on rocky outcrops on quiet beaches, sitting in thick fogs and listening as waves lapped the sand.
The summer after my junior year, I spent two weeks at the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute, twenty-five minutes from my house, at Quartz Mountain. There was a lake there, a pretty one, even if its name (Lake Altus-Lugert) was horribly unpoetic. I woke up early each morning and walked across the wood bridge spanning the lake, watching the sun rise behind the water. Sometimes I saw deer near the water on my morning commute. I avoided the bridge at midday, when wasps hovered noisily above the railings.
I returned after my senior year, but that was a dry year. The water was lower than before. One evening, I saw a dead turtle. I wrote a poem that year about the water. It wasn’t a very good poem. It referenced the Mississippi River, the Atlantic Ocean. I likened Lake Altus-Lugert to a dead place “where a wood church softly sighed / and fell to pieces.” I had heard there were buildings at the bottom of the lake, the ruins of a town consumed in a flash flood a century ago. I’m not sure whether the story was true, but I believed it then.
Oh, and I spent some time in the lake itself. I went tubing with a friend’s family that summer, and I enjoyed the feeling of being flung into the water, briefly submerged and powerless beneath it. I went swimming there once or twice, but I wasn’t a very good swimmer. A guy almost drowned while I was out once, and a friend and I tried to rescue him, but it was only thanks to my friend’s upper arm strength that the guy is (presumably) still alive. I was useless in the water.
Even then, in my final years of high school when I was actively seeking out the lake, I felt like I was trying to fill in something already missing. I don’t know why I desired water so badly. Maybe I just needed a break from Southern flatland monotony. But I live in Connecticut now, and I don’t go to the beach very often. I was curating, collecting memories that would make my formative years feel a little less dull in retrospect.
I still feel a pang of jealousy when I hear from friends who grew up near the water, who consider it a home. I watched a YouTube video of the Bay of Fundy’s tides a few years ago, and that video still plays in my head at times. I used to tell myself that if I ever had kids, I would raise them near the ocean. Maybe someday I will move out to a cabin on the Norwegian coast and learn to predict when the water will freeze. But looking back, my memories are on the land, and they’re mostly good ones.
When my cousins and I were young, we’d walk along a creek in their northern Oklahoma hometown. The creek ran just next to some railroad tracks, and sometimes the bed was dry. But I remember when the shallow water ran, and our tiny bodies jumped from exposed stone to exposed stone, finally landing on the opposite bank. We watched frogs hop around in the grass, saw tadpoles wriggling in the current. We looked for crawdads, even though I could never remember what they were supposed to look like. And we’d walk the length of the creek, ending up at the town church, and we’d walk the road back, stopping to feed goats through a chain-link fence. And the sun would set behind their neighbor’s farm, and the cats would return to the front porch, and the chickens would get quiet.