Photo by M.T ElGassier on Unsplash

Lake Michigan: A Study in Violence

Waiting and watching the breakers crash and strange rogues running across the incoming whitecaps, waiting to see the violence multiply over these odd angles. The colliding waves rise to an unnatural peak — skirting the bounds of unreason — and then bring foils of lily-white violence down into the grey-blue-green. Jagged, fluid, and dangerous is the great lake in cold December. Indeed, there is violence enough without the waves; quiet, patient violence; violence that seeps in and stills the beating heart by little more than a breath, a touch: a distant reminder of the frigid vacuum of interstellar space, or the void. When the day comes calmly, the hypothermic water is violence enough to make one watch and wonder upon such seeming contempt for the hide of a human. For many it is unnamable. They look and see the unending procession of rolling whitewater to the sandy beach and call it beauty, alone. A beauty that stands in a picturesque, and not altogether a reminder of an incongruity with the human outfit, and time — apparently static in its rush to the shore. They know, only as the human animal knows, but do not see with their mind’s eye the fathoms of volatility there reaching back to a stuff of the past that is both terrible and integral to the fabric of life. It is manifold beyond a privation of heat against a privation of cold, and beyond the time of year and the whims of the winds draw. There is something much deeper about. And the seagulls alight momentarily in the steadier ebbings between the wave crests. There is no rest on these waters and they satisfy themselves to hunt near the shores, crowding the beaches, awaiting easier days. Though December is only a kind of beginning, for the lives of these birds once born of the sea are here hinged upon this so massive of an inland lake and it’s perfect indifference: a cosmogony that can be guffawed at only by those who have scarcely considered that deep primordial darkness overhead.