Turning

by Jessica J. Lee

  The North German Plain, formed during the last ice age, is a lowland shaped by water: the cratered lakes carved into the ground, the north-flowing rivers formed from glacial spillways and the porous sheath of sand left behind by the ice. Many of the dips and depressions that make up the three thousand or so lakes in Brandenburg arrived as the glaciers retreated across the north of Europe some ten thousand years ago. It’s a place marked by flatness, by flat agricultural ground crowned with forest. Today, its highest points are wind turbines, scattered like seeds across the land.

  In many places, the region turned to marsh. In the Havelland, west of Berlin, Fontane wrote that cattle would get stuck in the mire while searching for dry ground. East of the city, the Oderbruch was so waterlogged it stood under ten feet of water in the spring. Mists hung over the marshes, impenetrable wastes vastly unlike the fertile Fens of England. The marshes of Brandenburg kept people out. That was before the land was drained and dried out in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries under Frederick William I and his son, Frederick the Great, with the help of Dutch engineers. Over the course of a hundred years, what was malarial marshland became monotonous, productive field. Along with the marshes, Brandenburg lost much of its native flora and fauna.

  There aren’t bears here now, but there are wolves. Small numbers of them, coming back from the east, travelling amidst the trees. Hunted to extinction over a century ago, protection has brought them back to Brandenburg’s endless stretches of forest. A third of Brandenburg is woodland, but mostly the predictable, managed kind: Scots pine in succession, awaiting harvest.

  In the flat, deeply-altered spaces of Brandenburg – cultivated forest, canalised marshland, restored moorland – there is no landscape without people. There is no wilderness.

  Instead, there is intimacy. The intimacy of a landscape shaped by history, of a place that holds the record of human joy and sadness. It is a place that is more than simply human: of mushrooms, the element of surprise; of mosses, their complexity just out of reach. Above all, it is a place of water. The most intimate of all.

  Rilke, in ‘Die Gazelle’, describes the moment in swimming when one finds oneself reflected in the water:

  wie wenn beim Baden

  im Wald die Badende sich unterbricht:

  den Waldsee im gewendeten Gesicht.

  (as when,

  while swimming in some isolated place,

  a girl hears leaves rustle, and turns to look:

  the forest pool reflected in her face.)

  In the stillness of the lakes, the border between nature and culture is thinned. Swimming takes place at this border, as if constantly searching for home. Water is a place in which I don’t belong, but where I find myself nonetheless. Out of my culture, out of my depth.

  —

  Swimming out of my depth still feels new and terrifying. Between strokes, a gap opens and is filled by every horrible thought of what could happen, every idea of what is beneath me and an overwhelming darkness. Thick and liquid fear rises in my chest. And I panic.

  I now know how to work with this. Lashing my eyes to a spot on the horizon, I swim forward and think only of what is above the water, that snow-globe arc of a world full of beauty. The ‘frog’s eye view’, says Roger Deakin. I stay there, and feel only the sensation of water running across bare skin. Fear can be dissolved.

  But once in a while it returns, a heavy pressure that weighs like deep water on my heart. And I’m at the bottom of the YMCA pool, looking up through the clouded, chlorinated blue at the feet of other children. Their legs are dangling off the edge of an enormous yellow foam duck. I can’t breathe. I’m underwater. I don’t know what to do, and I don’t know how to swim.

  It’s one of my oldest memories – I don’t now know how many of its scenes have been added by my parents’ recollections, but I know they’ve tampered with it. Otherwise I wouldn’t see them so clearly, banging their fists on the observation deck window, trying to get a lifeguard’s attention. It’s the same every time. They look down on the pool and bang their fists, and their love and fear is liquid clear. I’m at the bottom of the pool staring at dangling, tiny feet. The distance feels immeasurable.

  The YMCA in London, Ontario had one of those retractable-bottomed pools, which could go from shallow paddling pool to diving pool with the press of an enormous red button. We used to watch the floor heave upwards before swimming lessons and downwards when the big kids would arrive. So it could have been really deep. I was only three, maybe four years old; the water felt twenty feet deep.

  I sit on the bottom for an eternity, water weighing on me, before a whistle blows and a lifeguard in red shorts breaks the surface and swims down, grabbing me in one arm and drawing me to the surface as if it’s the easiest thing in the world. The distance from the bottom of the pool to the world above is nothing to an adult.

  They didn’t give me CPR, but for a time I wished they had. As if it would justify my later terror, render it serious. I remember the fear and the anger. My parents’ anger. It took far too long for someone to notice that I’d fallen off the yellow foam duck. Someone, I would insist for years, had pushed me. Why had no one noticed?

  Now, I laugh a little at the idea of drowning because I’d fallen off a floating foam duck. Nothing about it makes the fear any smaller, any less real, when I’m in the middle of a lake and it comes back, and I panic all over again. But the sight of an enormous foam animal at a kiddie pool or at the beach will still send me into inexplicable laughter.

  —

  We’re laughing loudly, and the leaves are shaking in unison. The wood was still before we got here, but now the little slips of green leaf are in movement with the wind, and light flows in between them and falls to the muddy ground. I turn back and look at Sennah, Rosie and Joy, asking where they would like to stop. They’re over from Canada and I’m trying my best to show them the city. The best spot, I tell them, is around the corner.

  They trust me, so they walk on, still laughing about some joke while I move ahead into the silent wood. Just a few yards ahead, I’m able to greet the silence, to have a moment’s breath. But I’m glad for their laughter, the raucous noise and the company. It is only the beginning of June, the beginning of my year of swimming, but I’m already afraid I’m going to be alone in this.

  The lake is to our left, and as we round the curve of a small inlet it shines blue and black under the sun and wind. In the shelter of the wood it felt warmer, but here on the small, terraced arc of sand, the wind skips out across the surface, and it feels less like summer. My friends look wary.

  Undressing, I step into the water – familiar, but I haven’t been here since New Year’s Day, when it was capped with ice. Now that it’s warm again, I think not of the ice but of the sun-drenched summer afternoons I spent here last year, when I first came to Berlin. I swam in Krumme Lanke often when I moved to the city, before I knew any other lake here, when I hadn’t yet made any friends. I’d moved and taken a research position in the city’s suburbs, working away at my dissertation in environmental history. I’d begun cutting my work days short by cycling to Krumme Lanke, its thin strip of lake water marking a crisp edge along the Grunewald.

  The Grunewald sits on the west side of Berlin, a thick swathe of green forest – literally, grüner Wald – preserved from development. Once a royal hunting reserve, the forest here served as the only accessible analogue for countryside for West Berliners during the Cold War. It was my first experience of a forest in Berlin. Krumme Lanke, one of its many lakes, means ‘crooked lake’. The name stems from Slavic – as so many of the names in the east of Germany do – for ‘river bend’, ‘crook’, ‘meadow’ and ‘bay’. It is a long, skinny lake, curving at the eastern edge of the forest.

  Those early days in the city, I swam alone and often, leaning my green bicycle against waterside trees and undressing between the leaves. Most days, a nearby pair of old women would swim naked and dress in the bushes, and some athletic swimmer would trace lines up and
down the lake’s length. I was less ambitious. Swimming a steady breast-stroke to the lake’s centre, I would turn on to my back and spread my arms wide, blue sky stretching tree-top to tree-top, an entire world spinning with me at its centre. I didn’t know any people in the city, but I found in the middle of the lake a small, self-centred security, like a pin stuck into a map.

  Now, I’m swimming out into the centre again and the water is cold – it’s only just June – and my friends are standing up to their ankles at the shore, shaking their heads. Midway across, I tread water and look down the lake’s length, grass-lined and whipped into small crests of wave. I’m cold and realise I’m in the shadow cast by an enormous cloud, so swim out farther to a blue and sun-drenched swathe of water, calling for my friends to do the same. Sennah and Joy have made it up to their waists by now, shrieking, and still eyeing me suspiciously. Rosie watches from the shore. Perhaps I ought to swim back.

  When I reach them, Joy reminds me that she can’t swim, and for a moment I’m mortified. I had lost myself so quickly. I know her fear well. But she assures me that she is having fun, isn’t going out of her depth. She can’t quite believe that in a city this size it’s so easy to find such a quiet lake. The belief that enough time spent in Berlin lakes will convert anybody to open water swimming isn’t new to me, but I am relieved to hear it from her so quickly. She gets it. I paddle nearby, where the shallows drop off, and watch as she and Sennah bend their knees and submerge their shoulders in the cold.

  —

  A swimmer knows a lake through sensation; through moving from the shore-line to the centre, through the feeling of the water. Warm, thick. Cold, sharp.

  But sensation alone won’t explain a lake to me. It won’t tell me how the lake came to be in the landscape, or how its seasonal changes take place. It won’t make me less afraid. For this, I turn to books. Early in the summer, I take out all the books on limnology from the Staatsbibliothek, old classics and new textbooks, as if I could encircle my fear with knowledge.

  As a science of lakes – or, more accurately, a set of sciences related to inland waters – limnology has been intimately linked to Germany. The earliest institute for freshwater research – the Hydrobiologische Anstalt in Plön, on Germany’s northern coast, now the Max-Planck-Institut für Limnologie – was founded in 1892, and one of the key scientific journals of the field, Internationale Revue der gesamten Hydrobiologie und Hydrographie, was established in 1908. The field itself was named by a Swiss scientist, François-Alphonse Forel, whose turn-of-the-century study of Lake Léman in Geneva introduced the term with the intention of creating a unified, broad science, encompassing all matters of lake study. The biological, the physical and the chemical.

  It is a field that thrives in a few pockets of the world, especially those plentiful with fresh water. The Great Lakes, near where I grew up, are a central focus. The Lake District in England has attracted study. And unsurprisingly, the region of Berlin and Brandenburg – with its wealth of lakes and rivers – remains a crucial focus for German limnologists.

  I’m not trained as a scientist, but an environmental historian must be adaptable. For this reason, I jump between history, ethnograph and botany. Archives, interviews and plant keys. As a swimmer, limnology is another kind of key. A way to read the lakes.

  A lake is shaped by all that it contains. At its most basic, it is a water-filled basin surrounded on all sides by land. But each lake takes its character from the ground surrounding it, the water that feeds it and the biotic forms that inhabit it.

  I start with a somewhat outdated classic of the field: A Treatise on Limnology by G. E. Hutchinson. His texts span lake biology and limnological botany, but the foundation of limnological study is in the geology, physics and chemistry that shape the lake in the first place.

  Hutchinson begins with the formation of lakes. Were they left by glacial retreat, by volcanic activity, by tectonic movement? The non-anthropogenic lakes in Berlin and Brandenburg were shaped by glaciers, through meltwater flowing in tunnels beneath the ice and kettles left behind as the ice sheet receded. Ice accounts for not just the shape of the lakes, but for their sandy, clayey or silty lake-beds.

  All of this matters to me, whether I realise it or not. The shape, depth and ground of the lake will help determine when the ice comes in winter, how completely the lake will freeze. So I find myself checking data online: lake depths, historic ice cover, water quality. The seasonal changes in a lake will be determined not just by shape, size and clarity, but also by wind skipping across the water’s surface, a subtle turbulence that mixes the water. The clarity of the water matters too, in whether it allows sunlight to the lake floor or whether the lake is at risk of stagnating in the summer. Levels of plankton and bacteria will affect the water’s clarity, and, in the interconnected world of a lake, they’ll move deeper and shallower according to the light. If nutrient levels rise too high, and oxygen levels sink too low, ‘eutrophication’ – lake death – can occur.

  I mark out pages in Hutchinson’s Treatise, pressing pink Post-It notes into its ageing leaves. Like I’m learning a new language. I compare his text with newer textbooks and write emails to local lake scientists. I’ll watch for the differences between each lake as I swim. I want to feel it in the water.

  a short spell

  The sun is at its hottest, and there isn’t a cloud to be seen. We’re rounding a green corner and there’s a railway bridge ahead, beyond which I can see a small copse of trees. We need to be there, nearer to the water’s edge. The heat bears down on my shoulders.

  As if by magic – which I know can’t last – a group of friends have decided to join me at Templiner See. Fifty-two lakes is a lot, so I’m grateful for the company. I’m only a few days into my year of swimming, and already it feels I’ve taken on too much.

  They’re trusting me to navigate, though I’ve never been here before, and they’ve absent-mindedly followed me for a mile to get here. I worry their patience is growing thin. They must hate me. It’s too hot to be out here, looking across the enormous expanse of deep blue. I pray silently that the right spot will materialise around the next corner. It has to.

  Potsdam orbits at Berlin’s edge like a small satellite planet. The capital of Brandenburg, it sits quietly outside of Berlin, an ordered scene of palaces and gardens cut through with busy roadways. Last winter, construction workers found an unexploded Second World War bomb underground in the midst of this commuter town. People were evacuated; trains stopped; disposal experts did their careful work. These fragments emerge from time to time, as if to remind us where we are. As we walk, I can’t stop thinking about this. Even on days this bright, the landscape doesn’t let you forget.

  The railway bridge we’re crossing is one of these fragments, built by the GDR in the 1950s to bypass West Berlin. Without it, the Wall might not have been possible. It is long, reaching across the width of the lake, which on a day this hot looks more like a small sea. Like the Great Lakes I grew up with, it is scaled for sailboats, not swimmers. The long walk in this heat hasn’t helped; I have decided in advance, unfairly, petulantly, that this lake is no good.

  The small break in the trees that eventually presents itself is actually quite fine. The powder black remains of a camp-fire sit near the water, which edges in gentle waves along the sand. Stepping in, I find the sand stretches a long way out, flat and shallow, and I swim out a way. Twenty yards from shore, I can touch the bottom. It isn’t as bad as I’d expected, but there’s no wilderness here, nothing to overwhelm and nothing to surprise. It feels safe, like the lake isn’t actually the small sea I’d thought it was, but merely a re-wilded expanse of swimming pool. Artificial blue and without life, just us paddling by the shore, a party boat nearby, and a small child and father a few yards away, splashing one another.

  —

  Swimming pools were the sites of so many of my memories. In one, I was eight, and my parents had decided that I needed to learn to swim properly. I’d not been back to the
YMCA since the foam duck incident, but I’d developed an excitement for the water, a love of swimming. So on Monday nights Mom and I drove to the YMCA and took joint, private swimming lessons, like siblings or best friends. We would listen to Phil Collins on cassette tape in the car and after our lessons we would buy plastic-wrapped Black Diamond cheese slices and egg-salad sandwiches from the canteen. Mom was an ally, a secret-keeper. I was the youngest, the baby.

  Like me, she didn’t know how to swim. But she was a grown-up so it took her longer to learn, and by the time I was learning the sidestroke – arms and legs joining and jutting outwards like an off-kilter frog – Mom was just blowing bubbles in the shallow end, her prescription goggles fogging in the water.

  The teacher sent me out to swim laps while Mom practised floating, her legs sinking low into three and a half feet of water. We were in the twenty-five-metre-lane pool, and through the glass window by the deep end I could see the big, square, retractable-bottomed diving pool. We never went in there, and I was okay with that.

  The lessons were always the same. Mom and I would put on our swimsuits – mine was silver, my favourite colour that year – and slip on our flip-flops and pad on to the pool floor. We would leave our glasses with our towels, so neither of us could see properly. Mom’s vision had always been worse than mine, so my image of her swimming always includes her face squished up beneath thick, black goggles. I could still see fairly well, but I needed to squint to see the huge, round clock with a perpetually moving second-hand tracing the time between eight and eight-thirty. Mom was in the shallow end, her hands on the wall and her face in the water, and I was swimming laps between the lane ropes. The deep end was six feet deep, and when I reached the wall I paused for a minute before taking a deep breath and sliding, pin straight, until my tippy-toes reached the bottom. Monday at eight was rush hour at the pool, so I wasn’t scared.