What the Water Knows

I went to Flathead Lake every summer as a child. I did not know then what it was giving me. I only knew the water was cold enough to steal my breath and clear enough to see my own feet standing on the rocks below, and that the Mission Mountains stood over all of it like something that had always been there and always would be. I did not have the words yet for what a place can do to a person. I only had the lake, and the light, and the long slow days that felt like they would never end and somehow always did.

I am sixty years old now. I have stood in pulpits and boardrooms both, have worn the collar and the blazer, have said words that mattered to rooms full of people who needed them to matter. I have written books in the spare hours between committee meetings, between weddings and funerals, between the ordinary emergencies of a life spent tending other people’s souls. And through all of it, some part of me has stayed a child standing in that cold water, waiting to go back.

So I imagine it now, the way I have imagined it since I was young enough not to know I was imagining a whole life. A small house with wide windows. Cold months long enough to mean something, the way they meant something to me even as a girl who only knew the summers. A desk facing the water, not for the view exactly, though the view would be a mercy, but for the light. Northern light. Steady and unsentimental. The kind of light that does not flatter a sentence, only reveals it. I remember that light from childhood before I ever called it that.

I imagine Stacey beside me in that house, both of us older, slower, glad of it. Coffee in the morning while the fog lifts off the lake like something being forgiven. A woodstove. A dog, maybe, though I have not decided this yet. Cherry trees down the road in Bigfork, heavy in July, the way I remember them heavy when I was small and did not yet know to be grateful for them. Snow in November that asks nothing of me but to stay inside and finish the page I am on.

I have spent so much of my life speaking to rooms. I wonder what I might say if the room were only the mountains, only the water, only Stacey moving through the next room humming something half remembered. I wonder what would rise up in me without an audience to shape it. I have always written toward someone. But long before that, I was a child at a lake with no audience at all, and I was whole there. I wonder what I would write if I let myself be that unwatched again.

This is not escape. I want to be clear about that, even in my own remembering. It is not that the work I have done was wrong or that the pulpits did not matter. They mattered enormously. But there is a particular ache that comes from giving your words to everyone else for thirty years, and I recognize it now, the way you recognize an old friend across a room. It is the ache of a woman who has never written only for the sake of the sentence itself, who has always had one eye on what the sentence would do for somebody else. That ache did not exist yet at the lake. Not when I was young. That is part of why I keep returning to it in my mind.

Flathead Lake does not ask anything of me. It never did. That is what I loved about it then and love about it still, the mountains needing no sermon, the water needing no saving. I could sit at that window and write the truest thing I know, slowly, without translating it for a congregation, without softening it for a family member who might read it wrong. Just the thing itself, plain, the way I said things to that water when I was young enough to say them plainly and have not always managed since.

I do not know yet if I will ever live there again. I know only that the wanting is real, and that it is not new. It has been with me since I was a child standing in that water, and I have learned by now not to distrust a wanting that old. It led me out of the boardroom and into ministry. It led me into every book I swore I would never write and then wrote anyway. Perhaps it has been leading me back to the lake the whole time, and I am only now old enough to hear it clearly.

So I let myself remember the water. I let myself remember the light. And I tell myself, the way I have told so many others from behind a pulpit: sometimes the place that shaped you as a child is the same place asking you to come home.

You do not have to arrive yet. You only have to keep facing the window.