You sort of smell it, but not really. And you sort of sense it, without really feeling anything. But the wind switches from the south and the barometer drops, and air seems thicker and temperatures rise.

I sensed it on Friday night after fish fry, and on hearing wind outside. Ice on Mendota was already rotten, crystalline blue two weeks ago when my freshmen augured up 16 inches, now opaque and patchy white, campfire remnants now dirty smudges. The ice-fishers pulled their shanties at the end of February and things looked lonely and distant. 

With winds blowing all night, I suspected that Mendota’s ice had maybe blown apart too. So, I spent my Saturday morning checking. Ice-free windward and stacked up lee shores are an ephemeral transition and I wanted to know it a bit, feeling time as a burden. Sure enough, ice was stacked up on the north by Gov. Nelson State Park and free west of Frauchi point. When it happens, it happens quickly.

I found what I expected but sounds of moving water, rhythm and rush, gray-sky patterns and foam, broke though. Even mundane and common, after a winter of stillness only occasionally animated by whale-song singing of ice movement, I stopped to savor the surge and swell of a lifetime of happy associations returning. This is the transition. This exact moment. 

We temperate zone types wait. We know how. But the sound of moving water again is a phenology of the soul.

The Didache (first or second century CE) is one of the earliest instructions for worship and it directs that baptism ideally should occur in “living” (i.e. moving) water and every Midwestern kid who’s ever done the shallow-draft dive into a clear lake or river understands why. Our native neighbors say that water is life. Immersion, both a biological truth and a spiritual truth. 

I read about the Didache in a devotional book (A Watered Garden: Christian Worship and Earth’s Ecology) that Pastor Kirsten gave me. I was on the search committee when she interviewed. We asked her to prepare a devotion and she brought a bowl of rocks (honest Midwestern granite abraded off the Canadian shield) and poured a pitcher of water over them and invited us to listen. I don’t remember much but even in the tidy artifice of the church library, water-sounds broke through. She described being so moved by the experience of a mountain stream, that she was compelled to kneel, wet her hand, and cross herself. 

I get that. I remember it each time. I’ve even self-consciously done it when returning to Superior or The Big Lake (always capitalize) or my dark little creeks, despite the baked-in reticence of a Lutheran Reformed ex-pat.  

When I ask my freshmen to write me a few paragraphs about sense of place, nearly every one, certainly every Midwesterner tells me about a watery memory. Its as if intuition speaks for a soul that itself tracks a watery presence never more distant than just over the horizon (metaphorically or not). We give something up to forget that.  

Weeks of dread and anger leave their traces and I struggle to nurse that anger into something useful. I don’t want self-referential therapy or a place to hide but watery connections, by now, to ground my sense of time and place. I needed to listen, to check my compass again. A culture’s relationship to surface water says much about their morality and ours seems poised to abandon it in favor of reduced protections, commodification, and that stupid pipeline in the straits.

That was March 15. The day the Wisconsin State Climatology Office declared as the official thaw date. It’s a little early relative to lake records since 1853, part of a long-term trend in declining winter ice cover, itself another data set pointing to a building climate catastrophe.

According to the Didache translation I found online, the way I’ve understood baptism is essentially a compromise. It instructs that living (moving) cold water is the ideal and that the tepid font is the concession: 

“…baptize into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, in living water. But if you have no living water, baptize into other water; and if you cannot do so in cold water, do so in warm. But if you have neither, pour out water three times upon the head into the name of Father and Son and Holy Spirit.”

And this is why, I found the devotional a bit unsatisfying when I revisited it for this essay. It makes the wholly virtuous case for bringing the experience of moving water back into worship in a largely intellectual sense. But (and I accept that I may be getting over my skis a bit in this readership that skews towards theological training), I think more and more that that’s the wrong direction. Instead of bringing nature more and more into the church where we tame it, we should bring worship out into nature and let it be wild again. 

Maybe that’s a first step in redeeming our culture of brutal disconnection (a guy can dream). 

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