360 some odd days since I've let the frigid water bubble past my ankles as it runs out into the deeper blue of Lake Michigan. My light refracted feet appear disembodied as they lead the rest of my legs, moving seemingly of their own accord.
The site of an annual summer pilgrimage, Thompson itself lies some 8 hours north east of my home, buried in the trees and soft sand of the Upper Peninsula. My first American ancestors ended up here, the conclusion of a long slow march across the emerging countryside, finding this small bit of land that sang to them in some way of their native Scandinavia and Slovakia.
This place consumes my father, looms large in his mind like memories of his grandfather - my great-grandfather - strong and proud in his simple mill-workers clothes, the prominent nose that also adorns my face making him unmistakable in the black and white photos that crinkle like dead leaves in my small, pale hands.
It was his parents who first tilled this ground, planting seeds, sowing generations, until at last they lay their own tired bones down in the sandy soil leaving white stones, names and dates, a history.
Like fish that swim upstream each spring, my family returns here each year compelled by the same elemental search for origins, pulled by some giant genealogical magnet, reveling in the migration.
The water begins to turn my feet numb as I let my gaze drift out to the growing swells of the greater lake, the waves just starting their slow steady march to the shore. The current makes eddies against my shins, the rocks, the roots of the trees that line the shallow banks. Where does all this water come from? How does it not fill the lake to overflowing, rushing over the beaches in abundance? Did my forefathers stand in this small stream? Words of wonder in their native swedish and slovakian rising to their lips like the trout in the deep pools? Feet anchored among the boulders, immovable as the land they came to know...
