How to Say Hello to a Lake

Missing a place the way you might miss another person means it has left its footprints in your soul

First, by the numbers - 232 miles of driving from Bayfield to Minneapolis; 1,392 flying miles from Minneapolis to Seattle; 909 air miles of flying from Seattle to Juneau, Alaska. Two weeks in Alaska and then all the same number of miles back “home.” But, it isn’t the “Bayfield Pop. 474” sign or even pulling into our driveway that signals that we are “home.” It is that first glimpse of blue, the big blue, the first sight of Lake Superior.

It is late October. The lake hills have turned “the color of the fox’s coat” as the Big Top Chautauqua song goes. We have been in Alaska for two weeks, boating, whale watching, paddling among shards of glacial ice like floating jewels, watching the ribbons of fog unwrapping the autumn mornings like a gift over Mendenhall Lake.

Alaska is an achingly beautiful landscape of distance and space and wildness, the kind of place that can leave fingerprints in your soul. It has in mine, and in that of my daughter Katelyn who now lives there and who we had gone to visit. As we hiked the wet trails of the rainforests around Juneau these past two weeks, I thought several times about a moment on a trip with her as a little girl, two decades ago, her first trip to Alaska. I was writing a book called Treasures of Alaska: Last Great American Wilderness for National Geographic with photographer Michael Melford. Katelyn had begged me to take her on one of the many research trips. So I did: a boat trip in Southeast Alaska where we shared many hikes, some in these same forests. But it was one particular shoreline walk we did together off of our ship, the Observer, that kept coming back to my mind. It may have been the moment that she fell in love with Alaska. The book records it like this:

(photograph by Michael Melford)

“During our last morning as passengers on the Observer, my 12-year-old daughter Katelyn and I go ashore for some exploring. Strolling along, I watch her walk unaware toward a stream that is roiling with spawning salmon. She steps too quickly to the edge and the stream suddenly erupts with fish, their tails whipping the water white with foam. Katelyn prances back toward me, laughing, splashing water up over her boots.

‘A lot of people come to Southeast Alaska and never get past the gift shops on the cruise ships,’ Steve Tarrant (the captain of the Observer) had told me earlier. ‘But when you get off the ship and touch this place, roll up your sleeves and stick your arm elbow-deep in a mossy log, or see a grizzly track in the mud, you become engaged with it. You have to feel the rain. You have to get your feet wet. Then it’s like plugging into the 220. That’s the raw feed.’

I see a bit of that raw feed buzzing in my daughter’s eyes as we walk back to the boat hand-in-hand. The clouds have come down, and a soft rain has begun to fall — plinking like musical notes off the countless shells at the edge of the tideline. There is water, too, sloshing inside of Katelyn’s boots, but now it is another part of her connection to this place, this ‘land made of rain’ and so she hardly seems to notice.”

Things are different now. More than twenty years have gone by, countless miles for me; trips to New Zealand, Mexico, Antarctica, and more for Katelyn. On this recent trip to Alaska, it was Katelyn who led the hikes, watching to be sure I didn’t slip on the wet shoreline rocks, waiting for me on the uphill sections when I fell behind. Smiling when I caught up as if she hadn’t been waiting at all, letting me catch my breath before heading on. It was bittersweet, feeling myself slowing down but seeing her, grown now, in her element: young and strong and in love with this place around her. Many years ago, I introduced Katelyn to Alaska. It stuck in her soul. And now, she introduces it to me as her home.

Miles later, own home is reappearing in flashes of blue between the trees, a shade of blue that brings pangs of longing and missing to my soul. What does it mean to miss a place the way you might miss a person? It means that place echoes inside of you, like a wave deep in a sea cave. It means that even while you are thousands of miles away, the footprints of that place are still on the beaches of who you are and will not be washed away by the waves of time or distance.

Katelyn in Alaska, as well as my wife Jill and our daughter Hannah on her travels, all wear pendants of Lake Superior on thin chains of silver around their necks, pieces crafted by local silversmith and friend Lissa Flemming who knows the pull of this place.

“This lake, these waters, she leaves an impression,” Lissa said once in a speech we gave together about the inspiration of Lake Superior, “and I am honored when someone wears one of my pieces to remind them of their own adventure. But more than that, I love knowing that it has fostered a love for the lake and with that love comes caring and a desire to protect the lake and these islands.”

(Silversmith Lissa Flemming)

I too feel that pull. As soon as we are back in our house in Bayfield with the luggage unpacked, I get back in the car telling Jill that I am “going to say ‘hello’ to the lake,” a line from one of our favorite movies On Golden Pond. With the Little Dipper on the hard for the winter, I don’t go far, just to a local beach to be near the lake. I walk barefoot in the sands still warm from the October sun, listen to the crinkle of leaves overhead in the branches and the shorter verse of the lake waves after two weeks of the long, slow stanzas of ocean waves. With each step, I think about what it means to be “home.”

There are many good reasons to travel - putting yourself in the midst of other cultures, among other species like whales and starfish and sea lions, discovering something both about yourself and the world around you, seeing a place through another’s eyes. Humans are a traveling species. It is in our DNA this desire to see what is over the hill or around the next bend in the trail. To paraphrase Ted Kerasote in his book Navigations we are a species in love with movement, with the sheer act of finding and re-finding the way.

But a part of that finding your way is knowing where you started, where your home is. Being at home in a place does not mean never leaving. It simply means having a place to come home to. It means that there is a place that never leaves you completely no matter how many miles you travel. Home is a place that both begins and ends the circle. And, here at home, we say “hello” when we come back.

In the movie, On Golden Pond after the character played by Jane Fonda says she is going to say “hello” to the lake, she asks, “Anyone want to join me?” Another character answers, “Me. I’ve never seen anyone say ‘hello’ to a lake before!”

I haven’t either and I am not quite sure how to do it. So I just walk quietly in the sand, savoring the soft touch of warm sun on my skin paired with the chill of the water against my bare feet. With each footprint in the sand, I feel closer to home. I don’t know much but I do know that this is where I belong. And so, when I am sure I am alone, when I am pretty sure no one is looking, I whisper to myself, and to the lake, “welcome home.”

— Jeff Rennicke

(all photography by Jeff Rennicke unless otherwise noted)

To see Lissa Flemming’s jewelry inspired by Lake Superior, visit her website by clicking below: