"The Dreamer" a new novel (in progress) by Clayton Boothe

And so my latest literary adventure begins...

[NOTE: Yes, this novel, like all of mine -- true also of most novelists -- is LOOSELY based on some of my life experiences, in this case on the two years that I lived in Ludington on the shores of Hamlin Lake. Just don't be fooled into thinking that ALL or even most of Thomas' ideas or experiences or problems are my own. That's really not the case. Or is it? Hmm...]

The Dreamer

a novel

Clayton Boothe

1.

Not so long ago, Thomas lived on a lake – a lake that he always thought ought to be designated as two lakes since Fishhook Lake was obviously divided into two separate bodies of water that were joined at the waist by a narrow belt that was only three or four feet across at its widest point. What’s more, this skinny canal was only a few feet wide and perhaps ten feet long when the lakewater was its highest crest. Only during these relatively uncommon months did the water level rise high enough to submerge a little more of the lake’s swampy, tree-root-knotted bottom, thereby creating this very narrow and short canal that only periodically and barely connected the lake’s much larger southern bowl to its much narrower and somewhat serpentine-shaped northern sister. This is clearly two lakes, not one, Thomas strongly believed. So he didn’t much like it that the lake(s) officially had a singular designation.

For that matter, Thomas wasn’t very fond of the given name for the lake on which he lived – the one that in his mind was more accurately defined as two lakes, the much larger and lower of which his house bordered on, sitting at the far-south end of the lower lake. On maps, this expansive body of water is officially named Fishhook Lake, apparently in reference to its rough profile which must have looked to the guy who named it like a common fishing hook, in which a long stem of wire is topped off with a small semi-circular head, like the ones used millions of times every day to catch lake trout and bluegill and crappie. Except, the lower lake looked nothing like a long narrow stem. The lower lake – which Thomas thinks must contain at least three quarters of the twin-lakes total water volume – is a large, bulbous oval, sort of the shape of a football. Meanwhile the upper lake, which is many times narrower and smaller in volume, indeed does look a little like the semi-circular business-end of a fishhook, complete with a barbed tip at its very end, where the lake points back down to the south.

To Thomas’ eye, from on the water and even more so when viewed from the air, Fishhook Lake looks much more like two separate lakes than a single one . And instead of resembling a common fishing hook, the two lakes look much more like a big fish that’s about to swallow a much smaller fish that is swimming right in front of it, like those oversimplified illustrations that whimsically depict the pros as well as the cons of every creature’s position in the food chain. Or else, Thomas sometimes thought, these two lakes look like the goose and the grouper in that classic trick-of-the-eye Escher drawing, with the outline of the much larger lower lake resembling a fish that’s pointed straight north in the direction of the much smaller upper lake, which itself looks a little like a common waterfowl that’s flying due west. And in the small middle section of the drawing, where the two lakes sort of converge, it looks to Thomas kind of like the center section of that optical-illusion-creating drawing, wherein the colliding fish and fowl morph into the grotesque shape of a some push-me-pull-me creature that looks either like a whale or a goose at the same time, depending on just how you look at it. Yes, that is the visual that Thomas thinks best describes these two lakes that were long ago misnamed as a single one. On the other hand, he understands how difficult it would be to express this notion in two simple, memorable and catchy names – titles that would quickly ensnare into the minds of boaters and fishermen and outdoor enthusiasts of all kinds, thereby bringing this place back to their minds, hopefully for generations to come, so the area’s tourism economy might continue to thrive. And so it was, Thomas reasons, that these two lakes were given a singular and admittedly clever if not visually apt name. Fishhook Lake it was called. And so it is, and so it was, and so it shall evermore shall be, Thomas finally had to concede.

Our hapless hero was also mystified and frankly amazed by the sheer amount of data that existed to describe Fishhook Lake. For example, the lake (which Thomas still insists is two lakes) is officially recorded to cover exactly 6,000 acres. Thomas didn’t know if the area of a body of water is measured in the same units as it is for a tract of land – in other words, if an acre of lake is the same size as an acre of farmland – or if the same-named units might instead designate two different magnitudes, the way one mile-per-hour of speed over land does not equal one nautical knot in velocity. But he did have a mental idea of how big an acre was, and six-thousand times that seemed reasonable to describe the very large expanse of Fishhook Lake.

Besides, Fishhook is an entirely man-made lake that was formed in the 1950s by damming the powerful Snake River just before it runs into the Great Lake,thereby flooding a huge swath of the adjacent valley beneath what Thomas guesses must be hundreds-of-millions of gallons of river water to form a generally shallow but unevenly deep lake, one (or two) that has the wildly irregular shoreline defined by the fickle rises and dips or ditches of every patch of terrestrial land, rather than by more natural and gracefully curving shorelines of most natural lakes which are formed over millennia by the relentless erosion of soil and even rock wherever the land abuts standing water. And since Fishhook Lake is essentially a giant flooded plain, Thomas believes its officially stated size is probably roughly the same, whether or not an acre of water is the exactly same as an acre of land.

Thomas thinks it’s fishy that Fishhook Lake is recorded as covering exactly six-thousand acres. Wouldn’t that be a crazy coincidence, or incredibly convenient! More likely, he guesses, the official figure is rounded off, probably to the nearest hundred-acres, since he’s noted that other lakes in the region are stated at sizes such as 3,100 acres or 1,700 acres. What’s more, the size of Fishhook Lake – as we’ve already noted – is not exactly the same from one month to the next, let alone from one year to another. Even the Great Lakes fluctuate rather significantly in size when measured across a number of decades – a fact that’s frequently attested to by longtime shorefront residents who often tell stories of their once spectacular beaches which have since disappeared, or else of their previously grand marinas with bottoms that are now covered in only dry oases of sand.

In any case, Thomas often marveled at the sheer mountain of data on Fishhook Lake that was publicly and readily available. What good is it all, he wondered? What possible utility could have justified the considerable expense needed to perform all these complex measurements, he sometimes racked his brain to understand. Because not only had the lake’s overall acreage been calculated (at least approximately, which seemed to Thomas would be difficult enough), but also its exact depth at hundreds of different points across the lake’s six-thousand-acre expanse. You can go online for free and in a matter of seconds put your fingers on what Thomas thinks may be called a topographical map of Fishhook Lake. (He doesn’t know if that’s technically the name for maps that show the varying depths of lakes, the same as it is for maps that show rising and falling altitudes for land.) This depth map shows the entire surface of the lake marked with dozens of nested and shrinking sized rings that look like the spreading ripples caused by rocks tossed into the water at countless points, with a little number beside each line indicating that section is 3’ deep or 5’ or 8’’ or 10’ or more. Although the lake measures 40-feet deep or more in a few small spots, it seems to Thomas that roughly half of the lake’s huge surface area plumbs down to 7-foot deep or less, according to this map, and that observation agrees perfectly with his own personal experience on Fishhook Lake.

One of the main reasons Thomas purchased his house in relatively remote Dongle Township was for its seventy-five feet of frontage on this lake that at first appealed greatly to him on both an aesthetic and superficially prestigious level; it gave Thomas a great deal of pride to own such a large waterfront property, and for a while he would gaze out in rapt wonder whenever he looked out his great room windows across the brownish-green expanse of Fishhook Lake. But this sense of amazement faded fairly quickly, in less than a year's time in fact, largely due to his discovery of how remarkably shallow so much of this huge lake (or pair of lakes) was. Once you’d been out on it a few times – boating or paddling or just swimming – you might quickly come to think of it as more of as a huge, irregularly shaped puddle, instead of a proper lake in which the vast majority of its bottom is out of sight and too deep to ever touch with your toes.

What’s more, Thomas soon became disenchanted with the overall appearance of Fishhook Lake. Before long, when he looked out across the lake, he focused more on its shoreline than on the water itself. And this view was increasingly unsatisfying. For such a large body of water, its shoreline was unusually flat and almost entirely featureless, unbordered at any point by impressive cliffs or steep hills that add so much to the majesty of many large and picturesque lakes’ appearance. Likewise, Fishhook Lake was quite poor, relatively, in its shoreline development. There were only a few dozen homes dotting its shores, many of them separated by hundreds or thousands of yards. Most of these structures were relatively modest in size, just like Thomas’ own under-1,000 square-foot house in Fish Nook Village. That’s the name of the modular home community he lived in, and it alone contained the majority of all the homes that were sited along the entire 50-mile-long shoreline of Fishhook Lake, all crammed into less than two miles of the southernmost coast of the lower lake. Within Fish Nook Village, these fifty-odd attractive and brightly-colored houses looked like they were built practically on top of each other. But from Thomas’ spacious deck (which doubled in Fish Nook Village as the homeowner’s boat dock), he needed a pair of field glasses to clearly see any other buildings anywhere around Fishhook Lake. He eventually spotted three or four or perhaps even five small groupings of mostly single-story simple buildings, including a couple of small-time camping or lodging businesses that Thomas later saw much closer up while he was out in his vintage runabout boat or paddling his wooden sea kayak. He rarely saw any signs of human activity in these rundown outposts, and so he wondered which, if any, of these enterprises were still in operation.

It’s entirely arguable exactly how large or attractive Fishhook Lake is, or whether it should be designated as one lake or two (as Thomas believes), or whether it’s shape is more aptly described as a fishing hook (per its official name), or else a giant grouper with its mouth wide open about to swallow whole a tiny guppie, or perhaps even like a big fish that’s on a head-to-head collision course with a waterfowl forming some kind of backwards evolution creature in the middle that’s equal parts aquatic and avian in nature. You could debate any of those points and, regardless of your personal opinion on that matter, it couldn’t be said that you were wrong.

What cannot be argued – not rationally, at least – is that Fishhook Lake exists. It is a real and physical thing that has an actual shape and form and in fact occupies a certain amount of space in our material realm. Thomas never questioned this; he isn’t a lunatic, after all. Nor does he suffer from any degree of schizophrenia or delusion, not as far as he was ever told by any physician or psychiatrist that he ever saw.

(In fact Thomas had seen several therapists plus a couple of medical-degreed psychiatrists as well as a dozen or more regular GPs over his now 50-year-long life, including the disproportionately high number of physicians he saw during the few short years he lived on Fishhook Lake. For the most part, however, this relatively large number of doctors he’d seen in the past 50 years was due to how often Thomas moved around the country and needed to find a new personal physician in whichever town he landed in next, plus an additional specialist or two whenever his arthritic joints began acting up again, or if he suddenly noticed a worryingly irregular heartbeat, or else if developed some mysterious and itchy skin condition that he suspected (feared) might be symptomatic of an annoying (although not very serious) STD that he might or might not have contracted.

The point is, Thomas was no kind of doctor junkie. Nor was he anything like those kooks who serially suffer from one psychosomatic illness after another, perpetually convinced they are grievously afflicted or even dying from any number of dubious, far-fetched “diseases” they had extensively read about on the internet – whether or not the person ever sees an actual medical doctor, and if so, regardless of those doctors opinions and diagnoses. No, Thomas was a normally healthy, emotionally well-adjusted and otherwise psychologically fit individual for a man of his age and station. As a human being, you would have to say, he was entirely average and unremarkable, in all of the best and most desirable ways that a man can be.

So Thomas never questioned the reality or the existence of Fishhook Lake, not once in the nearly five years that he lived on its shores. On the contrary, he must have laid eyes on this giant lake countless thousands of times. He thrust his hand into its liquid form dozens and dozens of more times, reaching over the gunwales of his kayak or power boat while he was out on the lake. Thomas even swam in Fishhook Lake a few times, usually dipping in from the picturesque sand dune that juts up from the lower lake’s far north end.

(This was the only notable geographic feature around the entire lake – we mentioned earlier how extraordinarily dull its shoreline was – and of course it was located at the complete opposite end of the lower lake from Thomas’ house. The few times he did get to swim in it, it would take him nearly half-an-hour traveling over water to reach this dune and swimming beach, even in his speedboat running at full power. He made the voyage only once in his sea kayak, running into a blustery chop when he was just over halfway there. He pressed on that day to reach the dunes, just to prove to himself that he could, but by the time he finally arrived at the dune, he was far too exhausted to go for a swim. Instead, he rested in the seat of his kayak for a few minutes, with just the bow beached up on the dune’s edge, before pushing off and paddling the five-plus miles back over open water, pushing hard the last couple of miles to reach home before the sun went dangerously down. This ill-advised and recklessly perilous expedition ended up taking nearly eight hours in all, and this no doubt contributed to Thomas’ declining affections for Fishhook Lake.)

Yes, Thomas’ feelings about this massive lake changed over time. And from time to time, his opinions or you might even call them his beliefs about Fishhook Lake would vary – from how large or pretty he thought it was, to how deep it was in different spots or how relatively calm or choppy it was on average. Indeed, Thomas is completely convinced that some of these attributes themselves must vary over time, the same way that the colors and beauty of a tree changes from season to season, making it entirely sane for someone to change their feelings about it. However – and this is a very important distinction – Thomas never doubted that Fishhook Lake exists. This was a simple fact that he never doubted, never even contemplated, certainly never debated and absolutely never averred. Not once!

Not until now, that is.

But these days – now some years after he had relocated again, away from the shore of FIshhook Lake and back to the Michigan “big city” that he left to move to Dongle Township – Thomas isn’t so sure. About anything, really! No, in fact, lately, Thomas’ degree of disorientation and the unfathomable depth of his confusion about, well, everything, is practically TOTAL! Which way’s up and which is down? The difference between black and white? What is real versus what is imaginary, or even whether (or not) either of these mental constructs actually exists in any meaningful or material sense? Thomas now has no definite answers to any of these essential Questions, although he does have a million contradictory clues. His earlier bouts of mental tug-of-war don’t add up to even one drop in that hundreds-of-million-gallon lake, not compared to the seemingly infinite breadth and depth of his current uncertainty.