Walking on Water
July 12th, 2010There are few things I dislike more than very, hot, muggy weather. A week of summer that stays above 90° and doesn’t cool off at night is enough to send a cold weather person around the bend. To make it worse, hot temperatures bring out the deer flies in such fierce, thick clouds that its hard not to think of biblical plagues. Yet even as I sit in front of the fan at my drawing table contemplating a trip to Siberia, I know this weather will have one great result that even I look forward to every year… It warms our northern lakes enough that even a tenderfoot swimmer like me can go for a long swim across the lake.
Oddly kids don’t seem to notice that the lake is cold and will jump right in in June and swim until their lips are blue and their teeth are chattering enough to cause lockjaw. I chalk that up to being too young to realize that they are hypothermic. And this doesn’t account for my girlfriends who swim in Lake Champlain every day — all winter. Seriously. They enter the water where Camp Dudley bubbles the water to keep it open around their docks and swim laps along the ice floe. I haven’t worked up the nerve to witness this in person, but I’ve seen pictures. But either they are demigods not disguising their Poseidon parenthood very well or they just don’t have nerve endings. For the rest of use mere mortals, swimming in cold northern lakes becomes much more of a pleasure after the water reaches 75°.
I even discovered that on a cool 60° morning that same lake — feels very warm as its several degrees warmer than the air. It’s surreal to slide into a warm lake that just a week before elicited a shriek that startled neighbors a mile away. Early in the morning, that warm water condenses into a fog that covers whole lake. You cannot see the other side or the sky, just a wall of white mist. Everything is utterly still.
So it was, when I waded in up to my chin this weekend at dawn. Floating weightless while the loons called somewhere off in the fog and sank to where my eyes sat right at water level.

From that vantage point I could see where the fog met the water in the distance. And that was when I saw them. There were millions of them, everywhere… water striders.

I have always watched water striders as they moved here and there in a seemingly aimless dance and even wondered idly what they were accomplishing with their perpetual motion. But I had never seem how many of them were actually out there doing their thing. It was the backdrop of the fog that made their colossal numbers come into focus. Intellectually, I know they don’t bite humans, but I still had to quell a momentary urge to run screaming from the lake. It was amazing really to watch them. How many times have humans pondered the skill they so effortlessly display?

Their ability to use water tension to stay afloat is nothing short of miraculous. And their sheer numbers are astounding. So there was a profound nature moment… floating at dawn in a warm lake… surrounded by silence, fog, loons and a million zigzagging beings walking on water, just because they could.
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