Incident At
Lone Star
All water holds deep threat. For me a personal antagonism, a mutual animosity. I know its ancient secrets, the barbarous things with teeth, suckers, tentacles that can rip into your flesh, peel away your hide. I know.
Also there is drowning to be considered—in depth. I’ve felt that panic a few times. The child man who cannot swim struggling up to be free of water, panicked, an hallucinogenic fight to escape, gasping for breath but swallow water instead. Legs kick about of no more use than a frog’s electrified in your high school lab.
Terror is doom come round.
This small lake, this water is no more frightening to me than most others. I loath them equally. Except that the water of Lone Star in my mind’s eye remains too foul for thought. It is turn-away ugly. Indubitably so for me, even in dry Kansas made seemingly safe by its vast parched sky and desiccated land.
Lone Star did give much and sure unease as I lay on it. Precariously afloat on its scum, pretending to an idyling bliss while in fact utterly becalmed without help at hand. Surrounded by it. Hysterics assuaged only by the tenuous treacherous security of my inflatable rubber raft. A raft bought for this purpose. It heaves with a Mickey Mouse emblem to hold me up safe, in counter culture silliness, at belly and loins, both of which are naked and plastered to hot plastic.
My inflatable raft is sucking rubber on my body this hot summer day. I’m on my stomach legs raised at the knees to keep my toes out of the water and away from snapping turtles, if there are any here. My chin rests on crooked arms, folded hands under my bearded chin. Fingers thus kept safe on the raft, so that nothing grotesque and inimical can nudge them, nibble them, and perhaps send me away screaming, mortified, shamed back to the quick of my young man’s self.
The mud-water lies under a layer of dead, dying, insects.
It is a La Brea tar pit ooze both repellent and fascinating. This lake water is too murky for reflection, nothing more in it than a dark cloud of unknowing.
I peer over the edge of my raft scrutinizing the lake surface for myth, Odysseus, Jason, or for nightmare images–my own Raft of the Medusa or a Titanic lifeboat crushed in a frosted sea trying bid farewell to hundreds upon hundreds of desperate and drowning people.
Above me the sky is an empty pallor. Sun is a melting glob of butter.
On all sides the lake lies dead. But the lake at least is surrounded by life, rimmed by old trees, oak, cottonwood and sycamore, a wilting green salad that from the sound must be the roost for entire nations of locusts and cicadas. Grasshoppers, crickets and katydids.
The cheap raft seems to my fearful mind to be losing air. I’m barely buoyed here in the middle of Lone Star Lake.
I’m naked. Everyone is naked here. All are vulnerable. They say naked is a state of freedom. I am not sure of that. I feel exposed. An imposter with nothing to hide behind and the focus of all judging eyes.
Also, everyone here is young. More vulnerability. Inexperience makes for a weird variable in human affairs. Such renders the scene in a languid post-bacchanal sensual drowse.
This is a skinny dipping lake for University of Kansas grad students, of which I am one.
Voyeurs, exhibitionists, the curious and the thrill seeker bored that at Lone Star nothing ever happens. Except just now I am watching for the first time ever a young couple fucking in the water.
He stands I suppose up to his ankles in mud, up to his navel in a coy draping of the muddy drink. She pins him tight with her legs, riding him so that her feet rock up and down with the motion of his hips, are her toes curling. They show and lhide ike a game with the treacle.
Their eyes roll. They are indifferent to all. They are finished.
Attention shifts.
Lone Star is a small lake, more of a glorified farm pond. The name doesn’t refer at all I’ve been told to Texas—rather to the ‘Evening Star Road’ that connects it from somewhere but that here snaggles off into a deeply pitted and rutted dead end.
Does Venus, our Queen and love star, lie buried in this inscrutable depth? Impossible. Yet the young coupled have coupled in it.
Without them this lake can’t ripple or wave. No undulation of hips allowed.
By surface Lone Star spreads around me in a sullen thick shit. By shape the lake is an asshole. No way could it to be harmless.
I knew the lake water’s secret. It was a poisoned sludge impersonating a summertime lake so to lure innocence—of children, youths and larking dogs– into the evil of its viscous Silurian soup.
That long long ago lake water was a great surprise when it ran trickling, transubstantiated, and clear from your fingers. Slipped warm and friendly down your stomach and thighs.
But on falling back in place it would splatter abhorrently, die again. Lie ironed out as before. Lone Star lake could never reflect. Too turgid. Not even a great sky made so wide and encompassing, so fair, a grand July sky in Kansas, could do more than give you an alternate point of view to ponder, a hope for the ethereal. A heaven to its hell.
Or so it seemed to me naked on my raft trying to keep as much of me, hands and feet, safely away from Lone Star. Especially of water I am not a reliable narrator.
My sense that it was an enemy came from my older brothers. My first memory of water in more than the bathtub was of me standing in shallows on the St. Augustine Florida beach. Lapped by tickling waves I could see through the there-and -then impeccably pure Atlantic to the very bottom of shifting sand and fluttering green garlands. Aquamarine crystalline.
But things I was told moved through it.
My brothers made sure I knew what those moving things were, small alarming monsters that would give me grievous bodily harm—sharks, barracuda, Portuguese Men of War, octopus, sting rays, lion fish. Whatever their smart boy brains could fathom up to make it for me a nightmare.
To make it real they would sneak upon me and grab my ankles in order to flip me forward. Or they pinched the back of my legs, yelling “Quick Johnny its Men of War.” Sometimes I remembered them them holding me down in the ocean waves. Or they’d pick me up and carry me out to sea bellowed for mother who evidently was not around.
Then I’d have to be pulled weeping from that beautiful water.
During the following summer my father took us to Lake Bemidji in Minnesota. There I don’t recall my brothers, but have another searing souvenir.
I stand on a dock, the cool northern water black, basaltic, another kind of beauty. An outboard approaches carrying a load of burly adults. Now, I know they were drunk. They throw me a rope and cheer me on to pull them in, When I try they backup and into the lake I go. Too little to swim, but they pull me out with great hilarity.
That was my first experience of drowning. So distant in mind but so vivid ever after.
I came out with dozens of black leeches on my skin. Another convulsion. As keenly I see my father in a murder rage marching hysterical me and the campground manager back to the dock. He gave the merry boaters a roaring tongue lashing and had the manager order them off the lake.
No. Water has not been my friend. Even though I’ve since been drawn to it—putting my toes at least into more than the Bemidji lake and the Atlantic. I’ve been into the Great Lakes, the Great Salt Lake, the Lake of the Ozarks, into Colorado mountain streams, into the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers. I’ve been baptized by the Pacific, the Indian Oceans, in the North, Baltic and Mediterranean seas.
Despite my brothers and drunken boaters, or maybe because of them, I did learn to swim if poorly. I preferred floating on my back to any particular stroke. My favorite movement was the dog paddle at which I became adept.
The most sophistication I can claim is my own style of the forward crawl. Because I refused to turn my head down, face submerged in water, it was a ponderous thrashing of arms and legs chin held up and head locked. Nevertheless it worked.
Lone Star Lake. Something sluggish, behemoth, I know, lies dreadful somewhere below its treacherous surface. Lay waiting for me deceitful, silent, motionless, eyes closed. Only its peanut butter skin saved me and those others from disappearing inside the midnight coil of its deepest digestive tract.
I lay there my skin burning, prone on my stomach, a naked young man drifting sluggishly through a timeless reverie of phobic complexities, looking with half hearted interest at boobs, snatches, buttocks, comparing balls and cocks in competition to my own.
Bedazzled by one hundred and one, or so, other bodies, mostly stoned or mildly sedated by warm beer. It was a time before obesity. The bodies were idealized, they’ve become paintings from arcadia in memory.
Sunlight shimmered about, glints of tiny nova lights, before Lone Star trapped it, caught it helpless on the surface, then took it sinking and hissing in a gulp, extinguished it in a snap of steaming sighs, swallowed it greedily, the water subsuming it.
To me floating on my inflatable raft it was utterly repellent.
Lone Star had no docks, no boat ramps, no life guards, it offered nothing to eat or drink, and no public facilities—the lake one imagined served for that– it was a bowl of solid looking runoff on maybe 20 acres of land. It was a secret held in ratio to being hard to find.
Not a farmhouse in sight. No sounds other than the fly like drone of human voices stifled by pleasure. But the lake was popular. On the weekends it packed in a throng which is why I went on weekdays to ogle and dream with a book for sun screen riding on my bare butt, or after very very carefully managing to turn over, open onto my erogenous zone where it bobbled on my off and on 50% erection. Hard-ons were not cool at Lone Star.
With cocky bravado I would have, did have that troubling afternoon, a joint behind my ear to remind me of how all this was no more than a passing pipe dream.
That afternoon my cherished raft and I stand becalmed perhaps 70 feet from one shore, about midway across the lake. To there, where my attention is drawn away from the pages of what, perhaps Moby Dick? That would be appropriate even if implausible.
Whatever, I’d just flipped awkwardly to my stomach, barely saving some masterpiece from the turgid drink. Most of us would agree, I think, that we humans know things when we actually don’t. That we see in a flash what we don’t want to. Believe in a fleeting second without cerebral certainty. That just happened to me.
I’ve gone into auto drive a robot rolling off the raft. Moby Dick or whatever floats away somewhere behind me. I can imagine its paper growing leaden with water, then disappearing without a single fluttering page. The raft too is lost. My joint has gone bye-bye.
There in the past I see myself plunging ahead with my best pitiful effort, straining in a rage of 25-year-old testosterone, driven by a needle injection of adrenaline. We beings are so trapped in ourselves but also so linked by animal knee-jerks.
I come to a spot on the lake. How do I know this spot? Don’t ask, I can’t tell. The question in this incident is clear to me, has been for 45 year so. Frightened me, cowardly me. It’s the answer that puzzles.
I remember sinking my arms to my shoulders, treading lake water with my legs. I am spreading out my arms with hands open, fingers clutching. Catching whatever they can I pull.
My hands are full of hair, both of them. Feels like I’ve grabbed seaweed. Plucked it up from the deepest darkest pit of Lone Star. Up from the lake they bring two heads to the surface.
In each I have the hair of a child’s head. I somehow manage to kick and struggle with their weights. My nemesis the terror of drowning fills me, of going down into that horrible mindless lake water.
But I do get them to the shore. I haul them up and roll them over, pounding their backs. They sputter and vomit.
Such an evil water to be regurgitated from. Beautiful creatures beached, so fearfully and wonderfully made.
They are tow headed little fellows, surely no more than six, twins too. To this day I’m sure of that implausible fact. How did I become lost in another mythology?
I don’t recall much more. A small crowd gathers to chatter excitement, oohing and aahing. They kneel as one, a comforting tribe around the little ones. They slap me on the back as if I had been drowning myself.
That was insufferable. I ran away from them. I hid from it all on the other side of the lake with people who hadn’t witnessed the little drama.
No matter, in about an hour a stranger appeared. He crouched worshipfully at my side sobbing. He could have been praying to me, laying at my altar his undying paternal gratitude, begging forgiveness for his father’s malfeasance. I didn’t say anything, although I wanted to, “Where were you, dumb shit, when they needed you!”
That slobbering nude man, was yet more excruciating business to flee from. Nothing for it but to run for my clothes, get dressed in my car, and bid adieu to Lone Star Lake.
Did the incident make me proud? No. Did it make me have a better opinion of human nature, my own included? Not at all. Did it make me take more swimming lessons. Hardly.
I was even more leery of water than before. I even became afraid of the wet floor of a shower stall.
What did come to me was a frightened veneration for the laws of probability, the improbable made probable, which rule us one and all.
Would that it had made me a better father when my turn came.
Any belief in God? Get serious. But how I did yearn then for what Lone Star had confiscated, my joint. My loose jay gone lost. Guess some payment was demanded in return for giving back the little ones.
Its magic had gone into them, far more real than smoke in a layering of marijuana dream clarity.