Viva Brighton Issue #64 June 2018

COLUMN
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Amy Holtz
The truth is, I’m a Minnesotan
My partner came in the
other day after a ride on
the Undercliff, with some
unfortunate news. “You
know those Brighton
bikes? People have been
chucking them over the
side of the seawall!”
This is truly incredible
– because those
things weigh a ton.
But also sad. Because
like Brightonians,
Minnesotans grow up
worshipping the water.
My landlocked state is checkered with lakes,
sloughs, ponds, rivers, sprinkled across the
landscape like windflung seed.
And with this proximity comes, for the
most part, a loving respect. But not before
encountering the many dangers of the lake –
chiggers (usually a Minnesotan’s first – but not
last – encounter with flesh-munching parasites),
wasps, tangles of slimy weeds, speedboats
towing double waterskiers after too many
Leinenkugel’s. There was always looming lore
about Northerns, a hideous fish that signals it’s
stalking by flashing its ghost-white belly – like
a Nordic Nessie. It’s got teeth like ice picks and
one summer, a huge one was said to have bitten
off the big toe of that Larsen girl when she was
dangling her feet in the water off the Dahlberg’s
dock. Poor girl’s straight line was a bit to the
left after that.
Us Minnesota kids were often told we would
turn into fish if we didn’t get out RIGHT
NOW and get in the G-Damn car, which
probably wasn’t far off the truth considering
we’d just gulped gallons of lake water, delirious
with sunstroke and loopy
from too many Italian ices.
But I never gave much
thought to what was
below the surface until
my first year at camp. The
counsellors would let you
take canoes out into Long
Lake – just so long as they
could see you. We paddled
out with our little arms
past the point where you
could ‘touch’ and there
we encountered what
they called ‘the forest’.
Bloated, bone-coloured tree branches reached
up all around, waving just under the water.
The sheer size of the trunks made it impossible
to tell whether they were fifty feet down, or
inches from the surface. You could jump in,
but you had to aim for a place wide of them,
into the black murk. And if your foot grazed a
stray limb, we’d all squeal like trapped piglets.
There’s nothing spookier than seeing something
that was once alive and towering trapped
underwater, forever doomed to be just out of
reach of the sun.
So that’s why, when it comes to the sea, that
tremendous, fantastic monster, I’m still finding
my flippers. I’ve ventured in, once, twice. But
each time I find myself imagining those handlike
tree branches, or, as happens in a recurring
dream of mine, the evil eels from The Little
Mermaid, Flotsam and Jetsam, tugging my heels
down into oblivion. Most days, I’m happy to sit
on the pebbles, eating chips, conferring with
the other pebble dwellers when someone does
something stupid – like go in. “Nutters,” we say,
in unison, shaking our heads at one another.
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