The lake in November

I flew back from Duluth this afternoon. Thanksgiving at my mother's: the two of us, a turkey breast instead of a turkey because there's no sense in the other thing, and her pumpkin pie, which is better than anyone's and which she claims is the recipe off the can.

Every time I go home I walk down to the lake first thing. This time it was the morning after I landed, before she was up, down the hill to the Lakewalk in the dark with my hands pulled into my sleeves. The lake in November isn't the lake on the postcards. It's the color of a cast-iron pan. It doesn't look like water so much as like weather that's lying down.

November is when the lake turns. Everyone who grows up on it knows about the gales of November, partly from Gordon Lightfoot, and partly because they're real. The water is still holding some of the summer's warmth, the air coming down out of Canada holds none, and the wind can come across hundreds of miles of open water with nothing in its way. The Edmund Fitzgerald went down in a November storm in 1975, on the tenth, with all twenty-nine men aboard. She'd taken on her load at Superior, just across the bay from us. Kids in Duluth know that before they know their times tables.

My father was an engineer on the ore boats for most of my life. The season runs from spring until the locks close in January, so November was always the month he was away and the weather was worst. I remember my mother at the kitchen window on gale nights, not doing anything, only standing there with a dish towel. I remember the marine forecast on the radio, which she'd turn up, and a man reading out wave heights in a voice like he was reading a grocery list. I didn't understand then that she was listening for the name of his boat, and hoping not to hear it.

Some years he was home for Thanksgiving and some years he wasn't, and we never knew until the week before. When he wasn't, we ate anyway, and she set his place, and nobody mentioned it. When he was, he slept for most of a day, then came downstairs and carved the turkey like a surgeon and talked about the lake the way you'd talk about a difficult relative you admired.

He's been gone eleven years. My mother doesn't set his place anymore. But on Thursday I noticed she had the radio on in the kitchen, low, the way she used to, and when I asked about it she said she liked the company.

I stood on the Lakewalk a long time that first morning. A boat was waiting out past the piers for its turn under the bridge, lit up like an office building lying on its side. I thought about the men aboard it, and whoever was at home listening to the forecast for them, and how strange it is that a place can be so beautiful and so willing to kill you at the same time.

What did the place you grew up teach you to be afraid of?