Lake St. Clair

When we see the third police car with its lights on turn north, I say “Something must be going on.”

But maybe not. This is Grosse Pointe Shores, where the police response to a stabbing is the same as to late mail delivery.

Then there is that red Coast Guard helicopter, silenced by our rolled-up windows. The waves are big lumps today, bulbous and pillowy. White-topped, gray rolls. Someone fell in.

It’s a day when someone, knowing the fine Midwest line between warm and cold fall days is about to widen, would decide to try one more chance to go fishing. One more time, and then fall over the side of the aluminum boat, the water already on the far side of that line. It’s just cold.

The helicopter heads south, so I tell my daughter in the backseat that they probably rescued him and are taking him to one of the hospitals.

She asks how I know it’s a him. I reply that I don’t, but whenever I think of someone falling off their boat, I assume it’s a male.

“That’s a stereotype,” she tells me. “But one I’m OK with.”

We laugh.

And I don’t tell her of the women, who periodically throw themselves into the lake when its at its coldest and grayest. Our own copies of oil paintings on Victorian novels. Rocks in their aprons.

A couple decades ago, my view of lake had no death whatsoever. It was motor boats anchored in Ford’s Cove. Diving in the summer water – warm. Biggie on the radio. Sun glinting off the calm surface; the lake was a mirror. Weeping willow curtains on the shore. Watch him do a back flip off the boat. Tie your tube to the boat. Coolers float.

But with time, with all that time, the silver tarnished.

This lake is your quick death – or your slow death if instead of falling over the edge of your boat you eat the fish you pull in. Heavy in their bellies with PCBs that slithered their way through the food chain.

That black on the top of the wake in summer.

The white foam that collects on the shore.

Those stretched-out, color-drained, dead fish bobbing on their sides.

It’ll get you.