August 22, 1971 - Entrance To Fall

It is the entrance to fall - here on the small porch to cabin #9. I am deafened by the sound of the water of Lake Superior, in great torment & stupendous movement. The sky has cleared now but the waves have lessened only imperceptibly. They have been cracking and smashing into magnificent cresendoes. I have not seen such waves here before. You can almost imagine the ground trembling beneath you but no, it stands solid and stoic as it has always. There, now, there's a quieting, but no, it is only a pause as the force gathers for the next attack - lovely roiling, boiling whirlpools as the water cascades back upon itself from the rugged rock shelves, the greenish brown water frothed & embroidered with frantic foam and spray. The noise overrides and supersedes all - it is unbelievably marvelous.

And a leaf occasionally drifts down to the water's surface from the birch and aspen along the shore portending the best of all, fall. Soft late afternoon sunshine casts gentle shadows across my face, casting the shadow of my hand as I write, upon the paper. Driving up this morning I had the clearest sensation of something waiting for me here. I could sense in detail my rock suspended in time anticipatory, as it were, my arrival. I could see it, as through gauze, the soft bottle-green of the water, the unsettled weathered pink granite, the golden underwater rock surfaces, the bitter green of the fine hair moss that ties under the water's edge. It was all silent and absorbent, waiting.

Instead, the water is mouse-grey-mouse-tan overlaid wherever it reflects the sky with a milky-pearly sheen of peach and pale blue. #9 is on a little cove & sitting on its rock I am out of the wind but able to enter into the spirit of the thrashing, crashing smashing waves. Watching the water like this it is difficult not to feel the water is alive. The waves break first to the left on the rock of #10 & then swing into the cove to meet resistance on all sides as the water from the previous wave returns on 3 sides to thwart the new approach. It all churns as tho possessed & doomed to endless torment. It seems it must tire so & retire to regroup its forces but never does it. If I am alive & open to what I see it is like building to an orgasm, the stimulation & exhiliration I feel as I am hypnotized by the ceaseless toll, the monumental energy displayed at my feet, is so great.

And Chalet was there yesterday in the late afternoon nearly-horizontal sunlight by the old locomotive in town & she was fringed with light in silhouette, completely featureless except where the light outlined her in a glowing incandescence.

And here again by the water very little less wild than yesterday tho the sun is warm & the sky is clear, I receive the feeling that I am watching a boisterous party, a mob, a mass gamboling in endless railling and I feel almost an impatience, a wish they would only stop their raucousness and an envy of the energy expressed, of which I have so little.