Hungry Lake

I'm flying, but I'm just a sparrow under the vast sky. I'm tall on my new self powered machine but yet so small. The lake, starting just there, 4 feet to my right, marches off into the darkness all the way to the horizon. The black unmeasureableness of it mesmerizes me. In the morning, with that line of horizon punctuated by a round sun, I can easily quantify my presence and size against its glimmer. But after dark the sea monster emerges. Her big, black mouth, whose throat stretches thousands of miles away to the cold North Atlantic, might swallow me up so easily. In just one tiny bight of the those toothy windswept waves, I could be gone. Lost forever in that inky dream.

Hungry Lake Michigan reminds me every day that I am small; that it is hungry; of how hard I must work to maneuver just 9 miles of her shore. Lest I think that the zenith of power lies in the pumping engines of those cars on the highway to my left, her dark water rolls in the breeze, splashing over a barrier to make a reach for me. What is power when one embodies force?