At the Access.

• Author: Hoagland, Everett

with loving memory of my parents, Everett and Estelle Hoagland

The view is always renewed. Today as I descended the weathered steps of the lake access, I paused to look at shadowed Champlain and remembered "Points Of Interest" in the staid, old Essex Inn's new brochure: the bay is four hundred feet deep far out, off nearby Town Park Beach. At the bottom I wondered who walked in, fell in, jumped in, went under to lake bed long ago. Who drowned among The Native Peoples, early French, the sport fishermen, canoeing tourists, heedless, headstrong children? Whose were the accidental deaths, recurrent, despairing suicides? Something unseen splashed. The whispering water's low waves, ripples, lapped the pebbled shore distorting my reflection as I stood there bare foot, ankle deep, on the edge I sank into deep, dark, cold silence; a sullen city frame of reference made the mirroring water more than forty stories deep ... ... A black loon surfaced, a small shiny fish sideways in its beak; shook its feathers dry; shook and headfirst swallowed its stilled, quick-silver prey. The wind picked up; the hardwoods' new leaves showed their silvered undersides. The pines swished hushes overhead. A...