“Moon…river…wider than a mile…”

She was singing to me in slow, warm breaths. I could feel her lips brushing my ear, but I wanted her closer, so I pulled at her hips.

“I’m crossing you in style…someday…”

It was night, and we were dancing. The moon shone a thin, half-full light on the smooth cobblestone rocks of the Lake Superior beach.

We were at the Big Beach, about 50 feet from our cabin and 15 miles south of Canada, at the Hollow Rock Resort. The air was cool and dry, normal for northern Minnesota in August, and a relief from the daytime heat that had just subsided.

The lake was quiet, as it had been all week, but the water stirred enough to nudge a few rocks, making the waterline into a kind of dull, random xylophone. Above us the sky was as calm as the lake.

My first reaction, on seeing the flat water and the flat stones, had been to run to the shoreline and skip rocks. This I did proudly (6 skips, 11 skips, etc.) for a few minutes, thinking she was watching me, awestruck. Then I turned around and realized she wasn’t there.

Hiding panic with playfulness, I called to her.

“Come on, what are you doing? Where’d you go?”

A long pause nurtured my growing alarm.

“Seriously, come out, this isn’t funny.”

This elicited no answer from the darkness, and that was enough to send me scuttling back up the beach. I was calm enough to remember I had a flashlight, which I turned on, but not calm enough to keep from dropping a couple of excellent skipping rocks.

Near the top of the beach, she popped into the light from behind a picnic table, her arms raised to resemble a grizzly bear. A real grizzly bear would not have scared me less.

But my anger was tempered by relief, and after I forgave her we sat and talked and tossed little stones into the giant lake. But revenge was on my mind. In a crisp movement, I brought the light just below my chin, turned it on, and made a hideous face!

…that she didn’t see, because instead of aiming the powerful light up at my face, I had pointed it directly at her eyes, burning her retinas and making her pupils close like spaceship doors from an early Sci-Fi movie.

Half blind and stumbling, she lunged at me, but I deftly avoided her swinging limbs. Her attacks continued verbally, and constrained to low tones by the quiet night and two nearby cabins.

“Why did you do that?” she scream-whispered.

“I didn’t mean to,” I said. “I was going to make a face.”

“Don’t do that,” she said, referring, it seemed, to everything I was, had been, or had ever considered, doing. I tried to cheer her up by doing the hideous-face flashlight thing again, but it felt empty and silly, like I was making fun of her.

I stood there in a blank, apologetic silence, while her anger eased. A quiet lakeshore makes it hard to hold a grudge. Soon we were back on the rocks, talking and sitting even closer than before.

And then we were dancing, and she was singing.

“We’re after the same…rainbows end,
Waitin’ round the bend,
My Huckleberry friend,
Moon…river…and me.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 10th, 2004 at 6:27 am and is filed under Minnesota, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.