Horseshoe Island

 She remembered the long afternoon, the last day they were at Woman Lake. The lake next to Little Boy Lake and Man Lake. Lakes really did have names like this in northern Minnesota. She imagined the days when the lakes were fields of wild rice harvested by the Ojibway Indians. They beat the stalk heads so the grains would fall into their canoes. That was the way the social studies book described it. This image came to her again now that she really was in wild rice country. But she hadn’t seen any of it growing along the shores of the big lake ringed with small rustic cabins, many hidden in the pines and revealed only by low docks and wooden stairs tilting up out of sight.

It was truly surprising that her parents had let her go out in the motorboat alone with Jeremy at the tiller and his cousins lined up in their orange life jackets on a wooden bench in front of him. She sat on the milk crate in the prow, turning back every so often to make sure they weren’t fighting or making it hard for Jeremy to steer.    

They had seen it from the shore, and from airplane views of the lake on postcards--Horseshoe Island. It had called to them all summer, but no one offered to take them out there. Now finally the parents were letting all the kids have a day to themselves. No question that’s where they would head, given a motorboat with a full gas tank. What could be more enticing than a small empty island in the middle of the lake? It really was shaped like a horseshoe, in fact, two horseshoes linked at their top curve, with two sets of arms each enclosing a shallow sandy bay.  There were hardly any trees on the island, mostly bushes and scrub grasses. In times of high water locals said the island was nearly submerged. Too small and low to build on, so thankfully left untouched.

She was careful to keep looking back to shore also to see where they needed to aim on the way back, but soon she couldn’t make out the cabin any more. It seemed to have been swallowed into a fold of shoreline, some trick of perspective. Then she looked at the sun to mark their direction. Would Jeremy even have the sense to look over his shoulder to orient and and navigate correctly on the way back? The cabin must be due west since the sun was past noon and fell over that side of the lake just slightly. It bored right into her eyelids as she tracked the shoreline.

Whenever she remembered this day, she knew it was one of the most important in her life. Did she know this at the time? Maybe not in language. She could feel the heavy sun on her body while she lay on the shallow inclined beach, how the miniature waves just tiptoed in and tickled her feet. She felt the golden eye of the sun straight upon her as if seeing into her body like an x-ray. It proclaimed her beautiful.

Amazingly the cousins were playing without fighting. It never occurred to her then that their parents might have sent them off for the day in the boat so they could have private time together. Were they longing to get in bed or were they just sick of the commotion of so many children whirlpooling around their knees?

But on the island, there was no passage of time, even with the sun measuring. It seemed to hang over the western trees for hours. Who knows how long they were gone. When they returned they had headed straight into a level sun. But during that longest afternoon on the warm sand, she felt an almost imperceptible flickering, a tense feeling that everything was about to change. If she could just hold the sun like an orange, inhaling the skin for a reminder of a forgotten garden. What could she still touch to remember this day? It was their last day on the lake and tomorrow they were loading the car and driving 14 hours toward home.

She didn’t hang out with Jeremy. He went a little apart from all of them and set up his fishing gear. He was always fishing whenever he got near water. She made little sand moats to enclose water and let the waves sweep them aside. The kids were running over to show the stones they had found, but they didn’t need much from her. That was good since she wasn’t supposed to be their babysitter anyway. They seemed to stick together mostly, like kids do in a big family and she knew they couldn’t possibly understand about being an only child. Still she was grateful for their wet tumbling limbs when they came racing down to her. She liked hearing them talk about the best way to build a canal from the prickly grass down to the water. They may have built an entire town for all she knew. She daydreamed away from there and when she looked back their imaginary city was collapsed and distressed by footprints and they were digging one deep hole for someone to stand in.  

They were not really there, these other children. Now Jeremy was chasing or being chased by the two boys. Did she wish they would chase her too? She didn’t admit she was wishing for some way she and Jeremy could be in league against them and he would have to lift her over a log. He was already as tall as her father.

When she remembers this day she is not playing with Jeremy or the cousins, she is sitting straight, facing the setting sun, on the far side of the crescent beach. She has an aching full feeling all along her front but it’s so foreign she doesn't notice it. She just wishes she could hold everything back. She’s not even sure what that everything is. She knows with a mute certainty that things will never be the same when they leave this shore. The beach, an island, the enameling sun, no one wondering where they are, the warm wind pushing the waves into the sand. Nothing will ever be as simple as this. Nothing to do but feel the warm water seeping between her toes. She’ll be a senior in high school this year. Less than a month.

She squeezes her toes into the sand, kind of a foot hug, pulling herself closer to the ground. She swivels her body to make more of a dish to sit in. She is almost holding her breath. The boys are throwing out more fishing lines. Their big sister Laura is collecting stones into a handkerchief. She’s the kind of girl who always has a hanky for sneezing, even on summer vacation. Came in handy, as she loved to point out. Everyone kept to what they liked, no one was asking her to be their playmate. That’s the way she liked it.  

When she recalls this time now, does it seem to slip farther away? She wants to recall every detail of this one day. She remembers it every summer when the light starts changing and fall slips in. She longs to go back to Horseshoe Island, just sit there, stay on the sand like a chimaera made by the sun.

Funny she doesn't even remember where Jeremy beached the boat. The water is calm, a huge expanse between them and the cabin-lined shore. Everything is so miniature and far away, while here they are giant in the giant sun. Their shadows are long and stretched up along the sand, all the way to the bushes in the center of the island. She can feel the sun coating her skin. She is wearing the blue and white gingham bathing suit that fit her perfectly. Looking back, today, she thinks: That was the last bathing suit I felt good in. 

But that isn’t the heart of it. How can she get to the depths of what this time was? How everything felt right in that warm, still afternoon when the wind barely moved on the water though there was something sliding over her arms and up her neck. A time, she thinks now, of no real awareness of sexual feeling in her body, the last moments of being a girl and just present in the body of a child, though lengthened out and nearly awake below the waist. Yet in that afternoon none of that kind of desire troubled her, or drove her. She could care less about boys. She was entire to herself. 

She was hearing the words of a song in her mind over and over: “like a broken-winged bird that cannot fly”, like the crushed bird she saw on the road coming back from town, one black feather waving crookedly toward her in the back window after the car swept over it. She tears up every time she thinks about it.

All these small things on the last week at the lake had so much weight, the weight of water, the weight of gold. There were the cries of the loons at night, and the faded pink and orange check of the curtains in her tiny bedroom with no door. There were awning-striped licorice candies from the market, you could pick them out of bins and mix and match. 

Her album by the Rascals, Groovin’, or was that the Lovin’ Spoonful? It would be years before she learned what the spoonful was. She never tired of that record played on Laura’s green portable player. She and Laura never talked. She still had her trolls with her and Laura looked scornfully at them. None of them would understand this state she is in, ever. If they looked over at her, they would see something frozen, something like a broken Greek figure half reclined on the sand. She didn’t want to change her gaze to see if they were looking at her, she could care less. She just didn’t want anything to change. She was going back to school when they left the lake, she would be reading and writing papers nonstop and she couldn't bear to think of any of that now so she didn’t.

She wonders: Did I know somehow on that day I would never go to Horseshoe Island again? There was never a family vacation after that when we could return to the lake. The neighbor family got bigger and there was no room for visitors anyway. Life streamed forward.

She wondered on and on about that afternoon on the island: Who was that girl sitting on the sand like a golden effigy, not aware of herself, except on the inside, somewhere, vaguely. Filled with longing and not conscious yet to name it, just drenched in it. She had no understanding of how she might appear to men back then, thank goodness, not interested in playing up to boys, wanting nothing except for time to stand still.

She would not have called it enchanted then, but that’s what it was, an enchanted time out of time. The five of them feeling the blood go out of the warm body of summer. Something was dying even as they felt its most full and seductive presence. The summer was their lover, that’s what they were all in love with then. Something huge, warm, generous, enveloping, such a lover. She didn’t understand then, but that’s what it was. She had a lover and didn’t know it. She was saying goodbye to her lover.

All she was then was a girl on the sand. She held the summer precariously balanced, not yet ready to tip it over and watch it expire. She could have held that generous summer carefully lifted toward the arms of the sky, held it forever. The summer that she and it were nakedly real, never more real again.

Now when she looks back she sees how much sadness was in that perfect afternoon. She knew they all felt it without talking about it. No one wanted to leave though the sun was dropping fast. They pried themselves off the shining beach and climbed into the hollow, ordinary boat.

“Horseshoe Island” was all they would need to say to each other if they ever met again, to remember that time when they imagined they could make time stop. Possibly they even had.

She tried her hardest, all that day, she tried to fix it in her cells. Something would be needed from this day, needed later, not that she knew it then. But now, 20 years forward, she knows she needs it more than ever. Who was she really then? Is she the same girl now who had the summer as a lover?

She can picture her so strongly, still there on the sand, in the bleeding-out sun. Part of her is certain she will find the enchanted girl on Horseshoe Island when she paddles out tomorrow morning.