Just back from a few relaxing days by a lake. I’m not prepared to say which lake, because I don’t want everyone following me there. I am still trying to decide whether I have broken my jinx with lakes and enjoyed myself. I think I probably haven’t. On the plus side, I didn’t lose my wallet over the side of a rowing boat this time. I wasn’t woken in the early morning by jet-skiers. My jungle-strength mosquito repellent almost repelled the jungle-strength mosquitoes. Rain didn’t come sweeping in every day from the mountains. And I didn’t have to listen to a lake bore telling everyone over breakfast that you don’t say Lake Windermere because Windermere already contains the connotation lake.
So what was on the minus side? I suppose the lake itself. For some reason, no actual lake I visit ever measures up to the ideal platonic lake for which I yearn. This could be because of a fleetingly beautiful trip to a lake I made as a child. We weren’t staying there. We were just driving by. My father never liked stopping the car, but at my insistence he did – just long enough for me to search out a few flat stones and make them skip across the water. It seemed a vast lake to me, the empurpled hills on the other side far, far away and whispering those impossible promises that only hills on the other side of a lake can promise. I threw well and my stones never stopped until they reached those hills, sometimes turning over as they skimmed the water, as slithery as water snakes and glittering like jewels.
A stone skipping miles across water, proving the thrower’s prowess, but also somehow bearing his hopes, is more suggestive to me than any bottle thrown into the sea. A lake is more mysterious than the ocean. Hard to say why that should be, given that the sea is limitless. But think how fascinating the idea of a loch monster is. There are doubtless far stranger and more menacing things under the sea, but the sea is not our business as a lake is. The sea goes its own limitless way. What’s under a lake is under us.
If you’re writing a suspense series for television and want to hint at matters inexplicable or even supernatural, put a lake in the title and you’re halfway there. Top Of The Lake, Wolf Lake, The Lakes, Black Lake, Ricki Lake. Say “Lake”, and down in our unconscious something stirs. So was I stoning my fears away all those years ago, or hoping to rouse them from the deep? I’m still trying to find out. It doesn’t always make for a successful holiday.
