brandon hansen

The Lake Within

I am a fisherman. Every time I raise my arm to cast, I’m searching for an answer.

What is a lake?

I throw my lure into dark waters, toward the lilies of my childhood. With every cast I hope the truth will follow it back, this piece of me I offer to the mystery.

My earliest memories are at the bus stop, where a shroud of mist swirled about me and I listed side-to-side, six a.m. eyes drooping while I waited for that big yellow ship to bust through the fog and open its doors before me. I was never a good sleeper, rarely felt awake, and when the bus would barrel along the shore of Long Lake, I’d rest my head against the foggy window and ponder how the water could sit so still, yet churn the mist. I thought there must be something beneath the surface that shifted the air upon its waking, like how the coffee pot starts the day with a hiss of steam, or how old truck engines across our village roar to life with a blast of exhaust, or how the nighttime’s remnant coals let loose a tangle of smoke when I’d open the woodstove and feed it the day’s first log, as I’d been taught to do if I wanted to stay warm.

I always ran blue crayons down to the nub, drawing lakes. While I scribbled in fish or stick figures of my dad and me, I didn’t notice how my clothes reeked of smoke, whether from the woodstove or Mom’s Marlboros burning away as she packed a peanut butter sandwich and waxy green apple into a paper bag that she shoved into my backpack. At lunch I’d nibble on these things, side-glance at the bright trays of food my classmates hovered over. I couldn’t stand the way my apple always punched a bruise into my bread, left it the same color as the bags beneath my eyes.

It’s like I never really woke up until school was over and the bus came back down the shore, where I’d hop from my seat and amble to the house. Sometimes my big brother Steve, seven years older and a child from Mom’s first marriage to a cocaine addict in Kenosha, would follow me and head straight for his room. But usually he was off in a sea of extracurriculars, maybe in a journey to be greater than his father, maybe just to stay out of the house. 

Garbage decorated our home: bread bags torn by our four dogs, clothes gone moldy after sitting for months in laundry baskets beneath leaks in the roof. Plates and plastic cups lay about by the dozen, and the dust was thick as lacquer, rendered everything in grayscale. My little brother Nicky would be waiting for me, three years younger and toddling amongst the dogs. I’d pat each of them on the head, throw my backpack, and grab my fishing pole. If Mom was sober, she might shout and stop me in my tracks from running to the neighbor’s lakeside yards, but she almost always had her face planted in the dining room table, a brittle plastic cup of vodka in her hand. So off I went to see the neighbors, who watered lilacs in their yards or polished the hubcaps of their cars. In those early days they let me fish in their yard because I was small and sweet I guess, a big-eyed kid with a crooked smile who wanted to catch all their bluegill.

What was a lake then? When I would dangle my feet in the water, watch the sunfish kiss at moths, and wait for the twitch of my bobber, I suppose a lake felt like an escape. It was unreality, a break of blue, a reflecting pool on the other end of a day where I was stared at like an animal at school, where teachers patted me on the shoulders and always asked if I was okay in this tragic way that made me feel anything but.

At night my ears would perk for Mom’s stirring, my brothers and I waited for the creak of her bed, her drunken footfalls, the toilet’s flush, and the return. With each step we winced at the possibility of that familiar slam of her body on the ground, the hollow thud of her head on the kitchen counter or woodstove. When she did make it back to bed, there was barely time to sigh before her half-waking moans of our father’s name filled the house and made the dogs pace. Dad worked sixty-hour weeks as a marine mechanic, made pitstops home in the evenings, then would dash back out the door and not come back until dawn. There was nothing for him at home.

Our stomachs bloated with hunger. Lightheaded, I imagined Nicky and Steve and I as those little fish I’d see bobbing against the shoreline sometimes, gut-hooked, pale-bellies ballooning them toward the sky.

I was never a good sleeper, rarely felt awake, so for hours in my bed, I’d gaze out the window and try to piece together the shoreline of the lake by the singing of the frogs and the only light I had—the moon in the sky and its reflection in the water. When, finally, my eyes would flutter, I couldn’t tell which was which. It all became a wash to me, moon and eyes and frog song.

-<>-

The Lake Within breaks before me and it’s usually very still. It’s almost always dawn, and mist coats my canoe, aluminum with chipped paint. I can’t see through the mist, but I’ve been here enough times to know the lake is shaped like Long Lake, and no matter how many places I see, no matter how many times I dream this dream, that will never change.

Because it’s Long Lake shaped, it means there are two basins before me, each long of course, and round, and in-between them the shoreline curves to a sort of pinch between the two, not unlike an hourglass where time flows thick.

There’s a paddle at my feet, and I push into the sand to break from shore. Right away, I see me, thirteen, taller than my dad already, six-foot-three almost overnight and in a constant wobble, always trying to square bony hips while cracking shins on school bus steps or quartered maple logs in the yard. Like a sapling I’m standing there on the neighbor’s shoreline, tying a lure in the mist. I fished there often on the weekends when Jim wasn’t home, when growing pains would jolt through my legs and wake me early enough to catch the dawn bite.

The Lake Within’s current pulls me along whether I paddle forth or not. I want to get a good look at that eighth grade me as he fades into the mist, and though I never can, I know he’s tired. I know that as his body sprouted upward a certain guilt grew with him. In the evenings his dad would burst through the sticky back door after work and throw his gas-splattered jacket onto a dining room chair hard enough to make its back legs jump. Then he would stomp, ankles cracking, to the couch, and sink onto the flat cushions with a sigh so long and loud it seemed it could fog the windows. It made that eighth grade me stare at Mom, drunk, her eyes like dirty glass that didn’t flicker at Dad’s presence, and then at Nicky, ten, my hand-me down sweaters sagging off him, who would pull his knees to his chest and gaze at the floor as if to make himself small against the dark pall that crushed our home. Steve, off to college, was gone, rarely had time to visit. Our dogs—Axle, Schatzi, Dagger, Tosha—all of a litter, leftover hounds from Mom’s past marriage, but the beating heart of our home, the warm bodies that made Mom and Dad’s escape from the city to the Northwoods feel like a dream, were dead. Still, clumps of their fur floated around the house like ghosts. It all made guilt swim through my body. I couldn’t afford to play with the fish anymore. I had work to do.

Throughout high school, I would hop off the bus and wave a goodbye to my newfound neighbor, Valerie. She was new as a neighbor but not as a person—I’d known her all my life; here and there in our youth she’d be waiting at the misty bus stop with me, could be found in my periphery on the playground at school every day. Only recently had she started living at her grandma’s house, right across the wildflower field from me. A year younger, I didn’t know Valerie well. But from her variety of bright jackets and ever-straight hair, I knew when we parted ways off the bus that we were going very different places.

Every day, I opened the door to our home and cleaned. I dropped my backpack and picked up garbage bags. It felt like if Mom was drunk, and Dad was absent, and Steve was gone, and Nicky was scared, and the dogs were dead, at least we could be crushed by our own gravity in a clean house—one that looked normal, even if it would never feel that way.

I shoved rotten clothes, piles of plates covered in dead ants, handfuls of mouse shit from the kitchen drawers, and my old toys into garbage bags. Dog-chewed dinosaurs and squeaky-wheeled race cars clattered around with hundreds of spent cigarettes, dozens of vodka bottles, Mom’s shit-stained pants, and orange pill bottles dated before I was born. I’d pace and sweep and scrub the smoke from the walls while the lake would shimmer through the window. I would ignore it. I was grown now, hungry and lightheaded and sighing whenever I sat down. It satisfied some part of me that I was growing into. 

What was a lake then? A distraction, I thought. Or a test of my focus. I thought my aches of body and mind sharpened me—that if I was in pain, I had access to a dimension the people around me didn’t. Unlike them, I could write my maxims in the constant slick of ash on our dining room table where Mom sat twelve hours a day: life, by default, is hard, and any moment spent on anything but fighting to make it easier only makes it worse.

Now over my head on the Lake Within there is a flock of snow geese, the kind Valerie’s grandpa would hunt. One day, in my senior year of high school, Valerie slipped her hand into my pocket on a cold morning at the bus stop, and wrapped her fingers in mine. My mind went blank. That evening, she pulled me, stumbling, from the bus, and told me we were going to meet her grandparents. I didn’t question it. I just followed her bright jacket to the doorstep.

Valerie’s grandpa would prepare the goose on the grill. And now on the Lake Within, the scent of mist gives way to cherries, pureed and drizzled over the warm goose breast. I can hear the shared laugh of her grandparents, a duet of sorts, one practiced with forty years of marriage.  I can taste the peanut butter pie. I can feel warm hands on my back.

This was a time of full stomachs, clean air—deep breaths.

There’s a distant rumble on the trail that rings the Lake Within now, and a little dust cloud that shows me where Valerie and I are, on her four-wheeler, which she drove fast, and I know my arms are wrapped around and nearly crushing her, and her dark hair is splayed by the wind to my face, and we are laughing, and going just to go.

And just ahead, not quite to the hourglass dip of the lakeshore, but close, there we are, she and I, misty forms on this very canoe from a different time, that sweltering summer just before I left for college, just before I left everything I’d ever known and just when I learned to let myself love the lake again, and there is Valerie, fishing rod in hand, fighting a bass nearly twenty inches long that I lunge for and grab by the mouth. I hoist it in the air, and I remember that drip of water nearly sizzling down my arm on that hottest day of the year, when Valerie screamed in a mix of joy and fear so long and loud it rings in my head still, right behind the waves of my laughter.

What was a lake then?

Those days, I was sure it was the realest thing on Earth.

I was the first person from Long Lake to go to college in almost a decade. Before me, Steve. Before him, no one I was alive to know. Twenty-thousand people and the infrastructure to support them labels Marquette as a quaint little college town, one that frequents “Must Visit!” lists for avid adventurers.

But the year I graduated high school, Long Lake’s population was nineteen people.

A one-thousand-fold difference between this life and the last. When my parents dropped me off on the sidewalk in front of the dorms, I shook. A school of chattering people pulled carts of their things around the island of me and my two warped cardboard boxes, reeking of smoke and pierced in the wavy folds of their edges by the hair of our dead dogs. A sunny-faced advisor checked on me when I hadn’t moved for some time. He was saying something, something about helping me carry the things at my feet, but I could only hear the broken exhaust of Dad’s old Buick as it rumbled down the highway. I wanted to chase after it.

There is a splashing somewhere on the Lake Within now. It sounds no different than an otter diving for perch in the shallows, but I see that it’s me, knee deep, splashing water on my sunburned face. It had gone red from long days wandering those bleachy sidewalks on campus, the crackled asphalt streets of the city that perplexed me, spun me around, and left me feeling like I knew nothing about what was real and what was not.

My first year wore on, and sometimes at night, I would walk to Lake Superior’s shore and call Valerie. Cold waves would lap at my feet. Meanwhile, my ears would chill to the wind and Valerie’s voice, which grew a colder tone the longer I was away from her.

Twice a month, sometimes more, every break, and sometimes just for the day, I drove the hundred miles home. I wanted to poke at the coals of Valerie and I, to keep myself fresh in my family’s mind. I’d shake the whole way through the city, learning how to change lanes and merge and when to stop and when to go all on my own. But the county we lived in was known for having no stoplights. So I knew I was close to home when there was nothing to stop me but grazing deer on the side of the road.

Oftentimes I’d pull up to my house at night, where my car would shudder to sleep, and I’d sneak in through the side room door, the only door without a tremendous creak. A wall of smoke would hit me—I’d stumble over moth-chewed clothes or garbage on the ground. My efforts through the years felt fruitless. Mom would awaken from her drunken stupor long enough to snap at me with unusual vivacity if I tried to throw away our piles of moldy baby clothes or try to burn the stacks of crumpled documents from when she held a job. Instead, I spent the days elbow-deep in cold sink water, where bits of pork fat or bread crusts would float about, buoyed by their growths of mold that left the kitchen reeking of algae. No matter how much I scrubbed our dishes, or anything else, it felt like nothing came clean.  

Then, in the afternoons, no matter how long I spent with Valerie, doing puzzles on the living room floor or skipping rocks into the lake, that glaze I didn’t recognize would not leave her eyes. She was someone else now.

I thought it might’ve been my turn to change, too. Now on the Lake Within, I hear the distant roar of my ’99 Chevy Prism, a light car made lighter from the bites of rust in its foundation, but so loud from its throat-slit exhaust that I could hardly think on those misty Monday mornings when I’d drive back to college, having solved nothing.

When I’d enter the city, I’d have to watch myself. Leaning forward until my back ached, I’d chug along, my eyes so stuck on the stoplight down the block that I’d nearly run the one in front of me. It was hard to say who I was becoming.

There’s a flurry of snow on the Lake Within now. Distantly, I hear Valerie’s voice, and mine. We are fighting. We are shouting about whether or not I have aspirations beyond settling things in Long Lake, but really we are talking about how different we’ve grown to be, but really we are thinking about those days at the bus stop, when we were too young to love each other the way we told ourselves we were supposed to now, but not too young to love each other as we always should have: as two big-eyed kids beneath that pine tree, adventurers forever enamored by the rush of misty wind and swaying dance branches.

This was a time of becoming. Early winter is when Valerie left me. My everyday person was gone from my life, and so my steps fell heavy on my late night walks, where my eyes could hardly leave my feet as they crushed a path into the glittering white expanse before me. I walked every evening, as if I’d find a path now that the path I thought I’d take was lost. The latticed streets soon became familiar, even if snow covered my tracks every night. Beyond the glowing rows of streetlights, there would be a break of stars, and they would illuminate the beach. There, at my destination, was only Lake Superior and me.

Now I’m in the hourglass dip of the Lake Within. Here, sheets of notebook paper pass by the boat. Scratchy handwriting bleeds from them, but I see the gist of my notes before they become one with the lake. For a long time all I did was study—study enough that I could spend two weekends at home a month and never open a book or laptop, as if to trick my family into thinking I hadn’t left at all, was doing nothing but thinking of home. I learned Descartes’ cogito—I think therefore I am, and read Thoreau, who said, A lake is… Earth's eye.

There are clumps of pages floating like lily pads that spell my rendition of world history and ethics, and I remember learning that I wasn’t really wrong back in the day: life was, by default, hard, and came to be in a manner as random and scary as it felt. I was back to that dark place, where it felt like doing anything but preparing for the worst felt like sabotage, felt like my worst moments that winter, where I’d walk through a blizzard to the raging Lake Superior, her waves nearly twice my height, and I would close my eyes and wonder if she would take me.

I pass into the second basin of the Lake Within now, and something incredible happens. It’s like one of those unexpected strikes every fisherman grows to know—on the back half of a retrieve, or when the lure’s just dangling in the water between casts—the perfect stillness explodes into endless droplets: little floating lakes all of themselves, infinite possibilities reflecting forever scales, fins, and eclipse-like eyes. These strikes always made the pole jump from my hands, made something inside me unspool.

And it’s like that when the Lake Within turns from its misty, shrouded self into a break of blue, a calm expanse where the sun suggests that the day has begun, so new and bright it makes me blink. And when my eyes open, there are people. Chatting in their kayaks along the shore, casting lines from their canoes. They are my friends.

Kicked back and skygazing on his kayak is the first person I really talked to away from home, Andrew, who I worked an odd job with, each of us hawking the newest Windows operating system to pocket some cash for Christmas presents. Andrew, who was 25 and from Detroit and told me stories of how gunshots in the night would shatter the glass of his dreams. He laughed when I replied by saying, Uh, at home, sometimes I can’t sleep because the frogs are real loud.

Then there’s Allison, in a canoe of her own, eyes following the slow fall of her golden line as she casts a fly far to the lilies. I recognized Allison at a glance in my second year, but was too nervous to say a thing until she caught me on the staircase after a class and said, You’re the Windows 8 guy! I said, I like to think I’m more than the Windows 8 guy, but yes, and we laughed and stepped outside, where Allison’s shoe came untied and she kicked up her foot and said, Tie it?  I blinked at her, unsure which of us was being weird. But I shrugged, caught her foot on my knee, bunny-eared her laces. At the moment, I tried some joke about how I could tie knots pretty okay because I was a fisherman. Allison smiled, said she loved to fish.

And so did her sister Caroline, who drifts about in the shallows and who I found in the sky tunnel between two buildings on campus. Already the second winter teased the skies and I shivered its grip off me in the hallway, where Caroline sat on the single bench and looked out at the rosy-nosed people bobbing down the sidewalk. I said, Caroline, right? and she looked at me, eyes a sort of green that made so much sense; she’d spent her life fishing a cove of Lake Superior, the greenness of which, of course, would bleed into your eyes if given enough time.

I would learn that Allison and Caroline and so many people around me came from villages, grew up splitting wood, setting hooks, getting lost in the forest. One day on a walk, Allison picked me a sprig of wintergreen, pointed at my mouth, and from that first minty bite I opened my eyes again and I started to see it everywhere—I wasn’t alone.

The Lake Within’s far bank isn’t all that far now. There’s a gathering in a clearing on the shore, and from it I hear the unmistakable voices of the students I would tutor. Half of them were on their second language—they came from Brazil or China or South Korea—anywhere but here. They mostly wrote about missing home. They wrote about the scream of life in America, how life here either stunned or dazzled them. In my final year, a South Korean student left me with a bag of tea from her home: a gift set quietly by my hand after our final session, one I didn’t notice before she was out of the door. When steeped, my water turned the color of the sun.

The other half of my students came from the little towns tucked in the woods all around Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. They told stories of their first deer shot, fish they caught with their fathers. They wrote about lean dinners, being put to work in middle school, about “friends” they knew who started drinking around the same time. All their stories swirled within me. All their stories were so familiar. At night when I’d lie down, right behind my closed eyes I pictured their lives—I pictured mine.

One day in the sky tunnel, Allison and Caroline told me about a trail in the woods near their childhood home. The trail led to Lake Superior, and as kids they’d hop from root to rock around the trail’s puddles—they were spring-fed and dark, opaque enough to make them wonder.

How deep were these puddles? Allison and Caroline’s parents told them that they went to the bottom of the world, at least. They said this to protect them, but could it be that these little bodies of water really bring us somewhere else? If I dove in, could I end up back home, head bursting from the surface of Long Lake like a bobber being released? Could I skip the hundred-mile drive and check on my family, marvel at the way our kitchen counters started to clear throughout the years, at how our floor opened up, and Mom’s stashes of vodka in the bathroom closet gave way to fresh towels, folded by her hands, which shook, but were now, if nothing else, busy? Could I slip back beneath the surface to my friends, my found family, my bigger lake, and close my eyes for the night, resting easy and knowing that things at home were better, whether through our sheer tenacity, or because healing takes time, and for time, there is no substitute?

After Allison and Caroline told me that story, I started to see lakes everywhere. Why not a puddle in the woods, or a cup of golden tea, or Valerie’s grandma’s cheesy soup, or the pool of tears in my mom’s eyes when I told her that I wasn’t moving home after I graduated college, but was going to stay in Marquette, with my friends, by the big lake? 

Even when I told her it was hard to believe myself—hard to admit that a piece of me found a certain charm to rain on the city sidewalk, that the electric thrill of passing beneath streetlights with my friends and watching rain slick the whole city into a wet golden glow made me feel as if I was swimming, as if life itself was a lake.

And I think that’s my answer.

The end is in sight. The water runs shallow as I approach the far shore of the Lake Within, where my family’s four dead dogs are not dead but sleeping on a fallen tree—Axle, Schatzi, Dagger, and Tosha—legs akimbo, on their backs, tongues lolled out; they are dreaming. In front of me there is a wooden pier where Dad stands, his rockstar hair from his 20s wild in the sun. He’s pulling a northern pike from the lake—he’s holding it over his head in triumph. Behind him is the cabin on the shoreline he always wanted. And in the cabin’s yard there is Mom, kicked back in an Adirondack chair. In sunglasses and beneath a polka dot umbrella, she butterflies her arms behind her head. She is pregnant with the daughter she always wanted.

And down the shore, distantly, there is Valerie. She floats on a raft, like the ones we used when we’d barrel down the Pine River, where we’d have to grab the rope hanging from the riverside tree in her grandma’s yard when the moment came, lest we get carried away. Her back is turned and her hair is wet and pulled around one shoulder. There are times she turns to me and smiles, and times she doesn’t.

When sand grinds beneath my canoe and the shoreline reeds tickle the aluminum sides, I feel my eyes fluttering. The Lake Within becomes foggy again, but not before I see the things that wait for me just before waking. There are algal blooms like the half-healed bruises on my mom when she would fall, floating globs of decaying plants rolling against the shore, brown, like piles of vomit I’d wipe off the bathroom floor most nights. Only the lake and its process can clean these things up.

Among the lilies on the shore there is a streak of red flowers like blood down an arm. And among the quartz and pebbles in the sand, there is the glint of a pocket knife, long ago pitched as far into the lake as I could throw it. Like many things in life, it finds its way back to the shore of my waking. Someday it’ll learn to stay there, deep, where I’d like to leave it.

A fishing rod is in my hands now, the one from my youth, with the brittle cork handle and eyelets a bit askew. A dimpled spoon, rusty but sturdy, dangles from the line, which still carries its memory of its time on a spool, despite the fact that I let it free every morning.

I cast far into this Lake Within. And with the splash, there is a new day.