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I don’t go to White Rock Lake very often. For me, it is on the other side of town, it takes a while to get there, and too many of my memories of the lake consist of walking on a baking, sun-drenched concrete path, sweating profusely and dodging angry, foul-mouthed bicyclists. The lake always lets down the idea of the lake. But in this city, starved for geographic anomalies, I keep going back. Last Saturday, my wife and I told our daughter when she woke up from her nap that we planned to spend the afternoon by going to Jimmy’s, buying an assortment of sausages, and grilling them. “Why don’t we barbecue at the park?” she asked. It was a real idea, so we obliged.

Lately we have been forgoing the east side of White Rock – the sunny, path-y side – for a little hill with a playground just north of the boat house. There are grills there, great views, and it is set apart from the weekend Tour de White Rock circuit. On this day, we claimed a picnic table halfway down the hill. As the girls bounced back up the hill to the playground, I dumped some coals in a nearby grill, doused them with lighter fluid, and lit the little pile.

When I was in high school we had final exams in early-June, one a day, and when you were finished with the test you could go home. It was a rare freedom, and it was odd to find myself at home in the middle of a temperate, early summer day with an entire unwatched afternoon at my fingertips. Junior year represented a peculiar transitional stage in my low-life to wanna-be-writer transformation. I was stealing books of poetry from the school library – Alan Ginsberg, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth. At the time I worked in the library during study hall and could have easily checked the books out, but opted to pocket them instead. On these open-ended afternoons, I would stick a handful of books in my backpack, get on my bike, and ride a four or five miles to a little muddy lake that was hidden off the side of a Long Island parkway. There I climbed under the bushes to a little clearing I had found along the shoreline.

I didn’t get much reading done next to the pond. I would read a few lines, and then let the book fall in my lap as my eyes drifted out across the waterline. The little lake wasn’t very large, only about a hundred yards at its widest. To the right there was an overpass that crossed the water, creating a “twin lake” on the other side. Occasionally, little fish would wiggle to the surface in the shallow water in front of me, their lips kissing the water line, making little ripple rings that grew outwards and disappeared.

It was the lake that arrested my attention: the constant movement of the water in the wind; the sense of great silent stillness; the water’s incomprehensible volume; the light sound of splashing against the vision of this volume’s great weight. The sunlight glittered off the surface, hiding the blackness of its depths. What was hidden in that mysterious unseen beneath? Putting down Ginsberg’s Kaddish, I had found a divine metaphor.

When the lighter fluid had burned off and the charcoal lumps were smoldering and graying, I poured some red wine into a plastic cup and walked down to the hill to White Rock Lake. At the edge of the lake, I stepped over some weeds and onto a large rock that was in the water. Standing there, I realized how long it had been since I stood at the edge of a large body of water. I watched the lake, watched it gently glide in place. I felt before something, witnessing this un-moved thing. I could still hear the muffled sounds of children spinning on the tire swing on the playground above, their shouts and squeals blurring into the wind before disappearing over the lake. The land and the noise stopped at the waters edge, giving way to this great forbidding space, this silent expanse. I stood watching it, the water gently lapping over the rock beneath my feet, the lake interrupting the landscape in a passive act of silent defiance.