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Lake Erie During a Seiche I was driving along Lake Erie during a seiche, the water peaking up nearly ten feet higher than normal, the chaos waves splashing up in spumes I could see through the trees. They said it could slop over the banks and onto my road, and I was glad I don’t ride a motorcycle anymore, not on days like this. It brought back that painting by Turner about the shipwreck, and I wondered if there was anyone on Erie today. I figured there had to be someone, and they might be desperate and holding out their hands like the people in the painting trying to grasp the ship in the far away distance, a ship they couldn’t possibly reach, but times like that you grasp anyway. Or maybe that was the other painting by Delacroix or maybe the one by Gericault. Anyway they all painted people in bad weather and drowning. People die on Lake Erie all the time because the lake is an unknowable place, and the seiche will drain the water near Toledo and then flood Buffalo, and everyone in between has to ride the chaos. I was watching the chaos out my side window as I drove down to the prison where I used to teach college English sometimes. That was a year ago, so maybe most of them were out. Maybe they’d gotten jobs on ships that transported things in Lake Erie. I thought about my relatives, and I have a big family. Maybe I had third cousins out there now. Anyone could be out there now, and I wondered why it mattered whether I knew them or not. Someone was on a boat working a job they hated. Someone was on that lake with an outstretched arm posing for Turner, Delacroix, and Gericault all at once. I pulled over at an overlook to see what I could see, and I didn’t see anyone, but the lake was all energy. It pulsed. It spumed. It was gray and white peaked, and I was glad not to be a seafarer. I might have been. My ancestors were. Some of them anyway. I wondered how many of them died in the sea. I thought about those paintings and realized that I loved them. All of those men in all of those boats were me, and I was them. I could feel myself riding the seiche and grasping for the shore. The way I’d rise up and be able to just make out land or a ship that was too far away to see me. The way my raft would bottom into the trough. John Brantingham John Brantingham is currently and always thinking about radical wonder. He is a New York State Council on the Arts Grant Recipient for 2024, and he was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been in hundreds of magazines and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-two books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction.
1 Comment
Kate Bowers
12/10/2025 09:20:44 am
“the lake is an unknowable place” —so beautiful—yet we get a glimpse into it here and its life beyond the water it holds.
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January 2026
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