Hold The River Banks Up

THE MILE-HIGH WOMAN
STALKS THE MISSISSIPPI
WITH HER GOLDEN COUGAR
part I
Kate Kokontis
A yearly pilgrimage to access the healing balm: walking for hours
on the shores of Lake Michigan. In this place, so much remains the
same, so much shifts from minute to minute – it is an inland sea, after
all, with life carrying on in the sky, on the surface, and beneath the
waves. The flat horizon, which you can see forever. The lake may as
well be the ocean, if sight is to be believed. The smell is particular to a
lake, lacking the brine of the ocean, but it is still fresh and fishy which
makes me feel wild and free, frisky and wriggling from my entrails to
my flesh. The texture below my feet is distractingly varied, sometimes
sandy and inviting, sometimes too soft with oil so you sink suddenly,
sometimes slicingly hard and sharp on a bed of rocks that stretches
too long. The sensory specificity of this place jolts my nervous system
to bring me back to all of the times I have visited in the past, the
textures and worries and feelings and hopes, the unknowns from
those times become suddenly palpable once more. Water is beautiful
and deadly, yes, but it is also soothing, such that a walk on a stormy
beach or a walk on a placid one does to my soul what water does to
rocks: soothes it, softens up its prickly bits, smooths its rough edges.
I go to walk the shore each year to convene my past, present, and
future selves, and there we confer, invisibly arrayed along the beach,
inspecting one another’s cracks and fissures, the soft bruised and
tender bits, the newly hardened ones, the new and old recognitions
and wisdom gained. The lake is a temporal container and a memory
machine.
Walking is the force, the propulsion, of movement between space and
time. The body of water is the container, and walking is a dredging, a
conjuring process, entreating and inviting the forms to rise up from
the past and the future. Yes, the past, present, and future coexist in
the same spot, and the ritual of walking in these places we have been
many times before, a cyclical return-to-the-source yearly after new
worlds have revealed themselves, this ritual walking-our-return does
the work of unhooking the opaque veils between time that make
this coexistence invisible, and making their mutuality transparently
manifest.
It is the gloaming, those hours between night and day when time is
especially thin, and it is the equinox, the time of leveling and evening.
Tonight, I am a witch; I shapeshift; I time-jump. I will myself to
become invisible, a mile tall, propelled by the wind, by the smoke
that swirls between and amongst these coexistent temporalities, and
by the strength of my own two legs to stalk like a ghost from the
shores of Lake Michigan down the length of the Mississippi River
to its mouth, which wetly makes love – sometimes withholding,
sometimes overwhelming – to the shore on the other end: the coast
of the Gulf.
16