The Case of the Receding Shoreline

My whole life I was mystified by the Case of the Receding Shoreline. Specifically I noticed that this happened to the shores of Mackinac Bay — the Western shore, the one we could see from our dining room table through the window, or from the dock which was a place that I always preferred to be and I still feel that way.

It happened just often enough for you to remember that it had happened before and this ocurence was a case of This Is Happening AGAIN.

But it did not often enough that it became a regular strangeness. (Those mysteries are much more easily forgotten even though perhaps we shouldn’t.)

You would stand there on the dock and maybe even take your shoes off, walk to the end of the dock and sit there with your feet in the cold spring-fed bay and just gaze.

How is it possible, you would ask yourself, that the other side of the bay has gotten a long way further?

And much more rarely, the opposite would happen. You’d just happen to glance while coming out of the kitchen or rounding the rocky path, and there! The western shore had come startlingly close.

Of course this movement was also very very startling. Suddenly the lake was smaller than it used to be.

I may have asked someone about the mystery at some point : Why was it happening? Did they see it too? What does it mean?

But I don’t remember their answers. Sometimes I was characterized as “dreamy” - a kid with his head in the clouds - and I got the sense that the question may have been chalked up to (and then disregarded because of) this particularly fruitless and indolent streak that ran through me. Perhaps someone even gave me a frank and believable answer at some point, but obviously I didn’t buy it.

Eventually I stopped telling people that it was happening or that I saw it, and just obeyed the moments of the appearance. When it happens you don't bother grabbing your camera (I tried, it doesn't show up and it's the same for cameras and the moon if you wondered). You don't grab the cowbell off the mantle and beckon everyone to come. You just check out of the world that contains other people and you slip your shoes off on the dock, and you go sit down and look at it with an accepting eye. That doesn't change the phenomena, mind you, it just broadens your ability to accept the unacceptable.

This photo is not precisely the Western shore of the Bay, it's St Ledger Island and I hope it can evoke some of the feelings that I've been trying to tell you about here, about The Mysterious Case of the Receding Shoreline.

(It's still happens. It's not something you can outgrow.)