meromictic

short story

Marc regretted electing to drive. At least if his father were driving, he wouldn’t be able to look up any of this stuff on his phone, and then maybe he’d allow an ounce of silence between them.

“Now, this here says these lakes are meromictic,” his father announced.

“I’m sorry, what?” Marc asked, having never heard that word in his life.

“Meromictic,” his father repeated.

“What’s that mean?” Marc took the bait, hands gripped hard at ten and two as his father had reminded him to do minutes earlier, when he ascertained his son was driving a bit too casually, not at all in the steadfast and focused manner he had surely taught him.

“It’s the opposite of holomictic,” his dad reported in the professorial tone he took on when explaining anything, even if it were outside his area of expertise, even though he was a professor of music theory and nothing else, never had been and never would be.

“Ah, yes, of course,” Marc said, measuring his level of sarcasm to the calculated dose a lifetime of living with his father had taught him was enough to avoid reciprocal aggression.

“So, basically, it means their deeper waters never mix with the surface layer, which apparently normal lakes do at least once a year. Everything deep down in a meromictic lake stays undisturbed; it doesn’t decay, it just stays the way it is. So, they’re some of the most researched lakes in the world.”

“Interesting,” Marc said, genuinely this time. Maybe this trip wouldn’t be a total waste of time, if these lakes were worth seeing, that is.

“What’s most interesting about it is how rare they are,” his dad said, scrolling on his phone. “The ratio of holomictic to meromictic lakes is like, a thousand to one! Lakes of this type are super rare, but there’s two here, right next to each other! What are the odds, I wonder.”

“Pretty good, I’d say,” Marc ventured. “I’d think there’s something about the geographical history of the area that lends itself to the creation of such lakes?”

Marc’s father looked at the phone again for a second, then put it down in his lap and glanced back over at his son with an intentionally incredulous look.

“Now see, I always knew you were smart. It says right here they tend to be clustered. You’re totally right,” he said.

“Yeah, turns out I can be right sometimes,” Marc said. His father either did not or chose not to recognize the edge to his tone.

Perhaps it was for the best that his father was the passenger, and could instead inundate him with these inane facts rather than strain for conversation via his usual method, which involved reading road signs and billboards or business signs as they passed and then wondering aloud about them.

“Hannah and Sheridan Goods & Comforts,” his dad said, as they passed such a sign. “Now, I wonder if Hannah and Sheridan are first or last names. I guess they could be both. Maybe husband and wife in the case of first names. Business partners in the case of last names. And what constitutes Goods and or Comforts? Kind of vague marketing, don’t you think? Maybe an old general store or something. Or a bed and breakfast? Do you think, like, Hannah did the ‘goods’, and Sheridan did the ‘comforts’? Why the ampersand between Goods and Comforts but not Hannah and Sheridan?!”

On the other hand, it seemed there was no escaping this. Marc’s father looked down again at his phone, no doubt trying to Google the Hannah and Sheridan Goods & Comforts website.

His father yawned. Marc felt one coming on but he stifled it away.

---

They were able to set up camp with marginal fuss and disagreement, the only points of contention being Marc’s father’s penchant for perceiving dangers like dead overhead branches (‘Not here, maybe set the tent, like ten yards this way? Don’t want it crashing down on us.’) and illogical sentimentality (‘Surely we need to face the entrance east to catch the morning sun?’).

The hike around Green Lakes State Park was only about four miles, a tepid task for Marc, but not for his father, despite it being more of a brisk walk along a flat trail than a real ‘hike.’ He turned around to let him catch up.

A Grateful Dead t-shirt over his rotund belly, rimless glasses propped up on rosy cheeks, and a long rectangular beard made Marc’s father look like a version of Santa Claus who had given up delivering presents to become a pothead, smoking doobies with the elves and Rudolph.

And in his father, he saw – as so many do – himself: wide frame, short, hairy all over, massive calves. Like they had gotten a lot of the old Neanderthal genes.

“Looks like we’re coming up to the first of the lakes, Marcus,” his father said, trying not to betray his tiredness in the breaths between his words. The sweat leaking through the lightning skull on his chest did that for him.

Marc continued with his father in tow, and soon they came to a juncture that a well-placed placard told them was called “Dead Man’s Point”, which through the trees afforded a good view of Green Lake, the first of the meromictic lakes.

“Okay, so it says here that these were probably plunge pools. Like, there were giant waterfalls here, probably bigger than Niagara Falls, and over millions of years, they created these lakes. They’re not sure why there are two, though. Holy crap, would you look at that! Really is green,” his father said, summarizing the placard as he’d done at every stop of the hike. Apparently, the trail was outfitted with one of these informational treatises every half-mile.

Marc had to admit, the lake and its deep, almost black shade of green found a way to be intriguing. There was something paleolithic about it, like the age of the waters deep within had a magnetic pull that would someday threaten to engulf the whole world and take it back in time.

“See that kind of reef-looking thing? Apparently, there’s like, really rare mosses and sponges there. Super illegal to swim in this part,” his dad said, leaning over his shoulder and pointing to the shallows where some calcified plant-like matter was visible just beneath the surface. There was something about the way his father did this that made Marc feel like he was seven years old again.

“Jeez dad, you stink,” he said, recoiling. “C’mon, we better get going. It’s getting late.”

They made it to Round Lake – the second of the two meromictic lakes – just as the sun had fallen behind the ring of trees on its western end.

It looked exactly like the first, if a little rounder and a little less green.

“That forest over there is old growth. Like, real old growth. Wow, you can even see – look how tall those trees are!” His father said. He didn’t point this time. The placard on the trail denoting this fact was barely readable anymore, it was so dark.

“Did you pack a flashlight?” Marc asked, nodding at the backpack his father had on.

“Of course, of course,” his father said, swinging off his pack and reaching into the front pouch. He retrieved a flashlight that was a relic of Marc’s childhood, from nights camping in the yard or power outages at his parents’ house.

His father clicked the flashlight. Clicked it again.

No light came forth.

“Ah, shoot,” he said, unscrewing the back and dumping the batteries into his palm. “Yep. Corroded.”

“GOD, Dad, what – you packed a dud flashlight? Didn’t even think to check it?” Marc rubbed his face, a tick of irritation that he inherited from his mother, something both their bodies learned to do in response to his father.

“Well, if you’d gotten to the house on time today…” His dad said, adopting an infamous tone.

“What are you talking about? Why did you have to wait until I got there to pack? You’re perfectly capable of packing without me. You could have checked the flashlight…”

“I mean that if we could have left sooner, we wouldn't have set out on the hike so late, and it wouldn’t be dark right now.”

“What the hell does that have to do with the flashlight? This is always how you are: blame, blame, blame, always someone else’s fault,” Marc said, taking the flashlight from his father, as if putting the batteries in himself would rectify the issue. It didn’t.

“Can’t we just use the flashlight on your phone?”

“Mine’s dead.”

“Well, why didn’t you charge it?”

“Do you have yours?”

“Nope, I left it at the camp.”

“Let’s just go. If we don’t hurry we won’t even be able to see our way back, like, at all,” Marc said. He felt the weight of the flashlight in his hand, gripped it by the rubber handle, then launched it with all his strength into the middle of the lake.

There was a barely audible plop as it hit the water.

“Marcus, come on, dude, why…” his dad sighed as they began to hustle along the trail. “What did I ever do to you?”

---

Father and son arrived back at their campsite much later, tired, scraped, and scratched all over. Halfway back, they decided to abandon the trail, cut through the woods to get onto a main road that had streetlights, but in the middle of doing so, the darkness became so intense that they were blind, tripping on roots and plowing through bushes. They followed the lit road back to where it passed near their campsite. It was a much farther walk than if they had followed the trail.

There was fighting, of course, in the decisions that led to that trek, and then over what to do for dinner, which culminated in each of them eating trail mix and energy bars in silence.

Well, mostly silence. His father talked about the ingredients in the energy bars, where they were from, how back when he was young, you could never know for sure what was in your food. How the year Marc was born was the year the USDA started requiring ingredients labels.

Even in sleep, Marc could not find relief. His father’s snoring vibrated the entire tent. If Marc had properly believed his mother on how bad it’d gotten, he would have packed earplugs.

“I’ve been begging him to get a CPAP machine,” she’d told Marc on the phone. “Trust me, you’ll see.”

Every few snores, his father seemed to clench his entire body and halt breathing altogether, only to come alive again a few moments later. Marc knew from his mother that this was called ‘sleep apnea’, and apparently his father had a horrible case of it.

Once, his father’s breathing stopped for several moments more.

Could this be it? Am I freed? Marc wondered without fear or sadness. This man who had done nothing but love and care for him, did he really wish him dead? How could he feel, in the passing of his father, that he would be ‘freed’? Freed of what – judgment and worry? The assignment of fault? The source of his lifelong fountain of self-loathing and criticism?

He stared up at the tent from his sleeping bag, wishing that in those seconds of solitude afforded, he could have seen the stars instead.

Just as Marc was about to try and kick him back to life, his father unleashed a guttural roar like that which succeeds the yanking of a pull chain on a leaf blower.

Sleep was sparse that night.

---

After their meager dinner, father and son had promised each other a fire-cooked breakfast for the following morning, steak and eggs. But when they awoke, heavy rain made making a fire a difficult proposition.

“Didn’t you say you checked the weather?” Marc’s father asked him as they rolled up their sleeping bags together in the cramped quarters of the tent. It had that feeling of being wet without really being wet.

“Yes, Dad, I said I did, didn’t I? It said a small chance of showers.”

“Well, I thought we agreed it’d be best to go next weekend if the weather wasn’t going to be good, didn’t I?”

“I thought it was going to be good. I thought it was going to be fine. Weather is subject to change, Dad.”

“I find it hard to believe that the weather report from yesterday didn’t fully anticipate this rain.”

“So now it’s my fault it’s raining?”

“I just think it would have been more enjoyable to go next weekend. But of course, you probably have something better to do,” his father said. Marc sighed and swiveled his legs out of the entrance to the tent and popped his feet into his boots. He stood in the rain as his father did the same, then helped him up.

“Whatever. Let’s just see if we can get breakfast somewhere down in that town we passed through on the way here,” Marc said.

“I’ll drive,” volunteered his father. They got into the red Volkswagen Golf with the innumerable bumper stickers on the back and both closed the doors at the same time, water dripping down their noses and eyebrows from just the short time in the rain. Marc’s father put the key in the ignition. Before he turned it, he said:

“I’m sorry, Marcus.”

“About what? It’s alright, Dad, it really is, we’ll get something in town.”

“No, no. I just mean…” He started, gulped.

It was entirely like Marc’s father to be mawkishly sentimental, to the point where you sometimes doubted whether he was sincere. But it was an attribute of his personality which rarely, if ever, manifested itself in an apology.

Marc looked at him, the only sound between his father’s words the patter of the rain on the windshield.

“I’m sorry,” his father said again, as he turned the ignition and the engine snorted to life. “For everything.”

---

thanks for reading this story about a particular kind of lake. even if you didn’t like it, maybe click the little heart button so that people who might will find it.

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BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS:

Why is it that sometimes so much goes left unsaid between parents and their children?

What do you think is exactly the problem between Marcus and his father?

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thanks for reading PNP, where fathers and sons have issues. if you liked this story, you might also like these: