I decided to stay here another day. It's not terribly expensive and I found a place that has decent non-fast food. I spent the day walking along Lake Erie and looking at things. This early in the winter, the lake hasn't begun to freeze, but it still has that unison look where the sky, the land and the water are all shades of the same color. West of Chicago in the deep winter, things get like that. On bad days, Lake Michigan looks like this. But I think they must have invented that gun-metal-colored monochrome right here. It's the end of November, no one much is around, and there's nothing but time.
I used a part of the afternoon learning to skip rocks again.
When I was maybe 9 or 10, my father tried to teach me how to skip rocks across the surface of the water. We tried at Lake Harriet, which is this sort of oversized pond near my parents' house in Minneapolis. It was always still and had a few of the crucial flat stones along the shore. My father always managed to get a stone to hop at least twice, and once I was sure he made it go at least six or seven before it disappeared into the gray-blue water. Mine always sort of went plop and never went anywhere. My father was always pretty good at showing how things ought to be done, but this is one trick that really needs a little explanation to go with the demonstration. I had the idea that the harder you threw the stone, the better it would skip. I'd wind up my whole arm and shoulder and hurl the stone at the water as hard as I could. It only made a slightly louder plop and vanished the same as always.
I eventually, more by accident than anything else, learned to skip stones. I was never as good as my father, never able to quite get the ease with which he could casually toss the stone and have it bound across the surface. I'd get a skip or two and be satisfied. I knew how to do it, but I never understood why it happened.
A lot of things are like that. By accident, you figure out how to muddle through them, but you never really find out the secret to why it works the way it does.
I figured out the secrets years later, on Lake Michigan, with Seth, and these were the things I brought back to mind this afternoon. Find the right flat stones, not too big, remember how to toss them easily, with a little flat spin, obliquely against the surface of a swell as it peaks. The gray bits of leftover glacial junk popped obediently into the air two, three, four times before vanishing.
Tomorrow, it's time to go home. I feel like I haven't thought through all the things I wanted to think through, and I know I haven't talked about them here in the way I wanted, but in the end, this diary is for me more than it is for you.