Family, Memory, Time and Place

There, approximately one and a half feet into the water from the shoreline, two different spots where concentric circles radiate from central blips and expand outward in rings, proof that she had, in fact, skipped a stone. My future wife’s self-disclosed athletic prowess was minimal, although I know she sells herself way, way short. She had memories of watching other people skip stones, watching in wonderment at something she’d never be able to do. But she had done it. She’d skipped a chunk of ice first, and then, after twenty or so very chilly minutes of replicating the ice technique, a rock. When she managed to send one caroming on the surface of the lake, only once but it totally counts, we swelled with joy, nailed a prolific high five (something else she thought she wasn’t so good at) and, grins wide and crooked, scrambled into a semi-violent hug. It was cold, and her warmth felt good. My brother snapped a cell phone pic of the fiver, and we used it on our ‘save the dates’. Somewhere further up the beach, my teenage daughter, cell phone temporarily pocketed, chucking stones as far as she was able. Behind us, closer to the car, my mom and dad, observant, contemplative and maybe a little chilly. 

Washington Island, in Door County Wisconsin, has a specific type of beach that creates a section of unusual shoreline with Lake Michigan. Thousands of white stones, flat and perfectly round, ranging in size from silver dollar to hockey puck and maybe even slightly larger in a few cases. There’s only one other beach like it in the world I think, maybe two, memory is…less accurate than it used to be. But my family and I have been coming here to School House Beach since I was a child, sitting above decks on the car ferry that crossed the treacherous Death’s Door passage of Lake Michigan from which, as many vacationing Chicagoans know, Door County draws its name. As a child, I watched my siblings scramble about the rocks, I watched my mother walk the shoreline, and I watched my father skip stones and eventually learned how from him. This was in the summertime, when the beach was full of swimmers; one had to be careful not to hit them with an errant throw. I wrecked my shoulder one year, heaving rocks that were too heavy without warming up. In later iterations, my daughter and I built cairns by stacking the stones, and I’d call her back from the waterline, where she was convinced she’d find the most perfect one, before she got her clothes all wet. She’d squeal and retreat from the little black spiders that hunted something smaller amidst the rocks. We never swam here, but we did visit nearly every summer, to look at the perfect stones, to feel the pulse of the lake, to remember how to be human amongst creation for five minutes. These are warm memories, sunkissed, and longer ago.

In recent years, we go to Door County and thus this beach in the offseason, a timeshare over Christmas that makes more sense now that everyone is older and the summer vacations from school no longer exist. And it's reflective of the trajectory of my family as well. Winter, more somber, solitary…aging is like that I think. I am keenly aware that my parents may not always be with us when we go (they missed this Christmas for medical reasons), or at least not in a corporeal sense. But dad’s skipped stones are out there on the lake floor, and will always be there, and there is comfort in that. Next to his, mine, and my daughter’s and brother’s chucked stones. And now my wife’s. My family will always be at this beach in one form or another. I think of the hundreds of individual moments I’ve had here, and with this lake and with my wife and mom and dad and daughter and siblings. Summer memories, winter memories. Fishing with the wrong tackle, walking out onto frozen piers, assorted pontoons and kayaks and sailboats and a jet-ski that one time. Bits and pieces, fragments of my childhood, recollections of recent years, all of them in the waves. 

I’ve come to prefer the wintertime here. It’s quiet, and still and…ours. We are alone as a family on the stone beach, my soon-to-be wife and I down at water’s edge, stooped and tossing, my daughter searching for the most perfect of the perfect stones, my brother, camera at the ready, and my parents looking at us all in a way that I am beginning to understand more and more each day; with love and pride and a subtle ache for the past. There we all are, on the rocks, skipping more stones onto the lake floor to live with all the other echoes of my family and their time here. Marina, my wife, has never been to Washington Island in the summer. She only knows it in the cold, the solitary. I’m sure that one day we’ll be standing on this beach in 80 degrees, mid-august, and I’ll remember the warmth of my childhood, and of my daughter’s. Maybe I’ll watch my grandchildren begin to make memories here, and I’ll tell them about their mom when she was their age, and about their great grandfather who taught me how to skip, well…watch this! 

But right now, I want only this moment. My fingers numb, my face chapped, and we are all here. And only we are here. All on the special stone beach, mom and dad, my daughter, brother, my soon-to-be wife, high fiving and skipping stones and searching and then retreating to a warm car. My family is together on the snowy beach, a moment as perfect as the thousand round stones, frozen in time like the lake in winter.