the third night of a three-day gale the house on lake michigan lost power and rattled as though bones beginning to loosen against the persistent, howling wind. in a way that is typically not apparent the world was living as readily as though a flock of birds as large as the sky had come to swarm around our place in the world, in constant flight, and in constant song. i went out into the night close to four to be in nature for a moment in the pitch black. i turned on the flashlight and when i turned around and a tree with legs and torso frightened me for a second for the reason that it was not difficult to imagine that somehow the windstorm had the power to quicken the trees, or bring to life a race of creatures that is otherwise not only hidden but impossible and unreal.

despite the late night i took melatonin to help sleep. in the morning the neighbors brought coffee, and i fell asleep again after examining the horizon and watching the sky. in the afternoon, i sat with my dad to watch a football game at the shamrock, a tradition which despite my limited interest goes way back on the island and in larger time to my childhood when saturday afternoons in the rainy fall were spent with my dad watching football and eating popcorn. for no reason in particular i remember doing somersaults and head stands in our living room one such weekend in rainy november between time spent outside playing in the wet leaves.

now at the shamrock bar, one of only 3 watering holes on the “emerald isle,” i already felt under the weather but being in the bar deepened the saturation. knowing my mother had decided to come into town to attend the afternoon mass at the tiny catholic church here which is pastored by a priest who lives with his partner across the strait in charlevoix, i thought it would be possible to find her and get a ride home. the wind at indian point where the house sits on lake michigan blew unrelentingly with rain and water spraying from the lake but in town despite the calmer wind it was moist and cold and the air smelled like it was the second week of november. i left the bar in chacos, shorts, a tee and the black thermal i sometimes sleep in—a crude outfit for a day like this but the best i could muster. it was cold, on the cusp of rain, with a bit of wind. suddenly i felt like dylan thomas’ recounted youth in wales. a particular kind of autumn that i’ve only felt in michigan characterized the day which was strange for many reasons the least of which is perhaps that the trees were still full and green despite the patina that signals the approaching end of summer.

leaving the bar i walked with hunched shoulders over to the church with my brother, after a stop at the liquor store and for a fish sandwich, something for which i had no appetite but figured that i had better take the chance while i had it in case my malaise took away my appetite later. no mom in church meant no ride home. curiously i felt at home in that church, which i had never been to before. maybe it was the feeling of winter nearing but i had a sense of place where everything around me is unremarkable but profoundly familiar and i got the sense in my heart and head that if I had to do it, to be here, and only here, even against my knowledge of the rest of the world, that i could make it happen. i could muster endurance and will and make roots and be glad doing so, if not at times weary and skeptical.

no mom in church. ryan and i left and walked down to the beach a block away to take a few swigs of whiskey since i was cold and he had just finished a run and needed something to make being in the bar tolerable while we waited. we shared swigs until the wind knocked over the bottle and sent whiskey pouring over the table and into the sand. back t the bar mom showed up, and after too long or not too long we were back home. it was the edge of the light beginning to wane but ryan and i decided to go out and collect wildflowers to make a bouquet as a dinnertime thank you to the parents. now it was raining again and we drove off toward the beach. walking across the dunes, looking out at the lake and its dark horizon line it began to pour and i felt a vitality from all the cold and feeling my clothes grow heavier with water. the lake pounded down the beachhead with the same silver turquoise as yesterday when half of me stood in the wild, rigorous surf and the other stood in the rain-laced wind yelling like a creature from a myth coming into the world in a place where there was nobody to see it quietly, the yelling drowned out in the barreling waves and the wailing wind which i imagined the ambient voice of creation to be if we could hear it.

ryan and i next went into the woods to find more wildflowers, following a trail through wooded sand dunes. i wore the same chacos and shorts that I had on in town which were now unprotected against the fact of the land, but the grainy wet soil and fragments of leaves covering my feet were true and not a nuisance. to mollify my chill and prevent complaining ryan handed me the bottle of whiskey and i started walking through the sopping forest in search of interesting things. no such luck really except some bare sticks and the sound of the wind in the trees and the ceaseless dripping of water onto the forest floor.

it began to rain again and my feet grew truly cold. after following the trail for some time, we turned back as it dusk came closer, stopping here and there along the way home to clip this, and clip that. we stopped again at the beach where we had been not too long before. this time, i went farther down the dunes, into the a heath of rugged dune grasses, shrubs, and pines. a smell of cedar at the turn of winter come up from the dune, streaking across the air full of the scent of the lake. i followed the dune’s crest farther. periodic blowing rain. periodic cracks of sun. here, facing west, the clouds were a scattering force moving in fragments and clumps, and vast strokes of color each at its own velocity. silvered blue, silvered green, silvered pink and peach. pale blue, and another deep like the storm at the horizon. a rip full of the sky behind it. at the edge between lake and sky, bands of rain. keys of deep orange and rose. this is what it feels like when the world opens up, when you can see more of it at once then we were ever supposed to. there’s nothing to do but stand against the wind, freezing.