BOUNDARY WATERS MEDITATION
by Claire Campbell
She wondered, would she start to measure her life in July's? “Five years”, Dr. Coleman said, “is a good milestone.” By this he meant that in five years she could consider herself clean. She thought of this as she sat on “swim rock,” the slab of granite on the shore of Low Lake . A fish floated up to the surface and struggled in the air. Why would it not sink back to where it could breath? She watched it wrestle with life, still forming this new timeline in her mind – July to July to July. After ten minutes, the fish sunk back into the lake and she rose from the rock. That July, she had relied on rocks. They were like the backs of ancient turtles in the Ojibwe creation story – on their shells the world was made. Swim rock had pools of life in it – puddles of water reddened the stone, moistened nearby beds of moss that sprang out of deep crevices. Cold bodies warmed their skin on this rock, dried in the sun and rested weary limbs after long days at the Field Station. Another rock, this one on Sarah Lake – a two-day paddle north, had anchored her with its flat face. She stretched into a sun-salutation and bent her body as far as it would go. Then she lay there and waited for the sun to set. She also remembered inching her way out slowly to the round boulder jutting from the falls on the Canadian border. She carried her yellow camping cup to grab a drink and then decided to climb up the craggiest side and sit on top. The water flowed past her, not against her. She would not try to bend it; she let it move through the cracks of her fingers and down to the red-feathered mergansers in the pool below. A year before, the same summer they told her it was cancer, she lived in Tennessee and dated a geology buff who slept in a tent. He was a “Conservation Studies” major, and he delighted in describing the multi-layered stones walling the trails of the pine forests. One weekend, he went to Chattanooga and asked, “Do you want anything from the city?”
“Bring me a rock!” she said, half-joking.
But sure enough, when he returned, he handed her a rough, black stone edged with pink and white lines. He described the different layers to her, slowly tracing the various colors with his finger, trying not to sound too assuming.
“Where did you find it?” she asked.
?A parking lot,? he said.
At dinner she began to cry – it was July 3, the marker of the first year. Melissa noticed and met her outside in the yard by the Field Station mess hall. They walked to the lab where they could talk in the half-light of the fish tanks gurgling.
Melissa had met her own five-year mark two years before.
?My doctor said, ?Go throw yourself a party!'? she recalled.
“But I just went home and cried.”
They talked about Melissa losing her voice to thyroid cancer, The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis, and her home in Salt Lake City . Then a herd of students came running through. “The northern lights!” they called, as they ran through the lab and down to swim rock.
“The northern lights! Aren't you coming?”
She wiped her eyes and rose form the table.
“Go,” said Melissa. And she shot up the trail past blueberry hill and down to swim rock and stripped off all her clothes and leapt in. The green and silver waves stretched above the lake from horizon to horizon, and she had nothing but the water to hold her up to the sky.
