Turning

by Jessica J. Lee

  Near the edge of the wood, I’m struck by a tiny flash of pale pink in the green. Terrestrial orchids, I think at first, but I look closer and see that it’s a patch of Himalayan balsam, an invasive snapdragon. They are aliens here. In other parts of Germany, they’re encouraging people to eat their stems in order to eradicate them. Its thin, toothed-leaved stalks can grow metres tall, shading out other plants, and its seeds erupt and spread when disturbed. But this one is small. The floral pink in September is striking, so I stop to look at the labial flowers. Few plants attract such hatred, but I can’t help but find them beautiful. I stoop down low to look at them.

  I’m ignoring the flies buzzing at my feet. Satisfied with the balsam, I step back, but the insect hum grows louder. As I look down I realise the ground beneath me is dried a deep red. It’s blood, and there are flies everywhere.

  I glance along the trail, but there’s no one else here now. I can’t see where the sound is coming from, but I can hear flies, loads of them. Though I should probably keep moving – I can see the road from here – I’m frozen in place, craning my neck to see the source of the insect radio fuzz. It’s in the bushes. Someone has moved whatever died here off the path, and in a horrifying haze I’m walking towards it, picking through the scrub.

  A pile of red organs sit to one side, and next to it, some unidentifiable thing, skin picked clean, covered in the blue-black of flies. A deer, perhaps, or a dog. I look closely but can’t recognise it, and as I stare the numbness dissipates and I feel only a churning sickness in my stomach. It rises, so I turn and walk, pushing my bike as far out of the woods as I can, as quickly as I can, trying not to be sick. I’m on the road again before I regain my senses, and ride back into town with a knot of disgust and fear in my gut, wondering if the clarity I’d found in the middle of the lake could only ever be temporary.

  —

  Later that night I awake from sleep and, wrapped in a coat and scarf, wander into the middle of Volkspark Friedrichshain. No one else is out, so I stand alone in the middle of a clearing edged only by a thin larch tree. I stand, eyes to the sky, watching as the incandescent white moon is swallowed, inch by inch, by a dark red, coppery and cold. It’s a rare combination of a super moon, as the moon reaches its fullest point nearest to earth, and a lunar eclipse. The blood moon is the first in my lifetime.

  I wait in the clearing for an hour, half-awake, watching the white turn to red, until the last remnants of light shine their brightest crescent. In this light, the usually flat disc of the moon takes its full shape, spherical and more real than I’ve ever seen, like a cold rock given life. Blood red in the night.

  Fully eclipsed, I watch it a while, my heart swelling in the darkness, before making my way back to home, back to bed. Outside my apartment, a father and son are stood looking at the sky, wrapped in blankets, eyes pinned to the eclipse. And I remember that this won’t happen again for a long time; this will be the only time this father can take his young son out to see the blood moon. I think of the other father and son, out at the lake, basking in the September sun, reading aloud. For a moment I feel at home again in this place in the middle of the city. The day that has passed no longer feels so dire, and I sleep knowing the sky glows red in the dark.

  a congregation

  It’s the first weekend in October, and I’ve set out for what might be my last long day trip before winter. I’m travelling much farther than usual, drawn to the magic of a lake I’ve only ever read about. Out the train window lie fields ploughed green and brown like corduroy, a patchwork of fields sewn together by irrigation ditches. Between two of them, a dump site is piled with soil and refuse, and amidst the piles is a cluster of sunflowers, tangled together as if in embrace. It’s a moment of tenderness amidst a strewn-about sadness, like the flowers had taken the time to bring sentiment to a discarded place.

  I spend the swift train journey to the northern end of the state staring out of the window. I’ve managed to hold on to the stillness of last week, the ease I found in solitude. I’ve longed for today. This one day in the week when I set out on my own, the lake at its end, blue and cool, salvation. I hope. As we approach Gransee, the train slows and I catch sight of three skydivers falling in disarray on the wind, faster than the train, like bats in the night. They fall like scattered seeds, and then catch the air and are pulled out of sight. The train is arriving.

  I lug my bike on to the platform and check the map. I’ve come prepared for a long day – the hour-long train journey to be followed by an hour on the bike, before I reach the woods and need to walk. I’ve made an exception in coming here: Großer Stechlinsee sits at the farthest northern edge of Brandenburg, a far cry from the other lakes I’ve swum this year. Earlier in the week I’d met with Michael, a freshwater ecologist, and he’d said I must visit.

  The Rheinsberg Nuclear Power Plant sits nearby, slowly undergoing the process of decommissioning since German reunification. Once a prized demonstration of East German technology, the plant has sat disused since 1990. As one of the first nuclear power plants in Germany – and the first to be decommissioned – it is a stark interruption in what has become a quiet landscape. As dismantling has carried on, the plant and its machinery have sat like a time capsule in the forest: yellowing panels with buttons and dials, ageing control rooms that look like cut-outs from mid-century design magazines. Still, workers populate its hallways, quietly winding up their work.

  Before 1990, the water that cooled its reactors poured out into Stechlinsee, heating the lake. Now, the lake’s crisp, almost neon blue-green sits quietly, a still life in an empty sky. Stirring the foam of his coffee, Michael had spoken of the water’s clarity and assured me of its safety. The record, he’d said, is in the sediment, as heavy metal contamination from the plant settles into the upper layers of ground sediment in the lake.

  Ten minutes from the station, I’m cycling a paved forest path. The wind has picked up, and as I cycle my mind is on the skydivers I’d seen from the train. Their haphazard fall, the trust it must take, like being caught in a current. When you get pulled out by a rip current, you’re meant to swim sideways, parallel to the shore, to choose right or left. You aren’t supposed to struggle. But falling through the air, you don’t get a choice.

  I’m cycling absent-mindedly, not really here at all, and then – thwack – I’m called back. An acorn dances off the top of my brow, narrowly missing my eye, a tiny force that nearly topples me. Be here, it seems to say. I reach up and check my stinging brow: no blood. I pay attention. The forest around me is a thin stand of oak, swathed in orange. I want to be here, in autumn, at the far end of the state, so far from the city, moving through the wood.

  The trail opens on to a quiet residential street, and I’m reminded of the thinly populated landscape of Fontane’s Der Stechlin, the novel that brought this lake into Germany’s popular imagination. His name still carries weight here: a species of whitefish that occurs only here bears his name, Fontane’s cisco. Scientists are trying to determine how the fish came to be here – and only here – in this isolated place.

  Fontane’s literary Stechlinsee has a plate-glass stillness, no birds or boats, and springs to life only in moments. He describes the Legend of the Red Rooster, in which Stechlin erupted with geysers in tandem with far-off seismological events, like the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. As the geysers broke the surface of the water, a red rooster was seen flapping its wings angrily, whipping the lake into waves. The myth has preoccupied not just Fontane, but scientists too. At one time, seismologists sought to study the lake and its legend. Even today, in one study of the lake’s algae, scientists surmised that the ‘Red Rooster’ may simply have been an accumulation of Planktothrix rubescens, a red-hued algae. Now, a painting of a rooster adorns the walls of the Leibniz-Institute for Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, which has a laboratory on Stechlin.

  Today, I find the lake calm. The forest surrounding the lake isn’t the orderly, patient timber-wood of Brandenburg’s silviculture indus
try. It’s all sloping hillsides and mosses, diverse and alive. I lead my bike off the road and into the trees, the sheen of water on the horizon, wheeling into the silence. My bike cracks over a branch, and I look up, terrified, the sound breaking the stillness. Ahead of me on the path a pair of eyes stare back, ten pairs actually, antlered, locking my gaze with theirs, and then they dodge off, all legs, into the pine. There must be hunting blinds nearby.

  I come to a footbridge, and from here can see out over the whole of the lake, flat and cool. Looking down, I can see right to the bottom, the crooked clumps of molluscs dotting the sandy floor. Sound seems to have vacated this place, as if I were standing at the centre of an empty cathedral, a hollow stone cavern, but the sun moves over me and I remember that I’m outside. A voice echoes out over the water from maybe a mile away and makes the place seem emptier than it is. Fontane wrote that in this part of the country a kind of unconditional silence reigns.

  Off the bridge, I stop amidst a cluster of beech trees, crouch low to the ground, and count mushrooms. I’ve never seen so many in one place, certainly not around Berlin, where the hollow monotony of pine is a constant companion. But here there are at least twenty, a record of a landscape left untouched by tree-felling, a forest in its full diversity. Fly agarics in reds and yellows, stiff polypores, the shiny white caps of a mushroom I’ve never seen before. I can’t keep track and I begin to grow dizzy, so stop at a rough-hewn bench and prepare to swim.

  While the air is cooling, the water isn’t too cold yet. I slip in, taking tentative steps out into the sand, my feet prickling on the shells. The sky is completely still, but I can still hear the echo of voices somewhere else on the trail, and somehow it leaves me feeling more alone. It is vast, and I’m afraid. I think of the power plant, and the gap of fear opens wider in me. But looking out over the flat of the lake, I’m reminded that it’s beautiful too – it can be both – so I swim out, the clear water dipping deep beneath my kicking legs. I’m a dark and moving figure at the water’s surface.

  —

  The Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries sits on the eastern shore of Stechlin. Germany is awash with research institutes like this one – indeed, I first came to Berlin because of one – due to a relative glut in funding for independent research across the sciences and humanities. The Institute has laboratories on both Stechlinsee and Müggelsee, enabling scientists to compare the dramatic depth of the former with the shallow enormity of the latter.

  Here, the Institute maintains a floating lake laboratory, a series of twenty-four ‘mesocosms’, shaft-like tubes that extend all the way to the lake’s bottom. It is among the most advanced laboratories of its kind. The mesocosms, which are about the volume of a small pond, enable scientists to study the lake in miniature. As the lab remains in place all year, the Institute is able to run experiments in every season, as the lake undergoes its transformation from the sunwashed clarity of summer to the frozen immensity of winter.

  I’ve been reading scientific articles about Stechlinsee, looking up new terminology in The Treatise on Limnology, in textbooks and online, trying to understand what makes Stechlinsee so remarkable. I’m beginning to sense the differences between the lakes I’ve visited, the ways their annual cycles differ from one another. In temperate, deep lakes like Stechlinsee, the layers of the water stratify according to changes in temperature. Lakes like Stechlinsee are known as dimictic: deep lakes that mix fully twice a year, with spring and autumn overturn. In winter, they are covered with ice. The movements of the water – lake stratification and overturn, the lake’s turning – are the cycles that keep the lake alive, ever-changing, breathing oxygen into every part of the lake.

  Water is at its densest at four degrees celsius. In spring, the surface of the water warms beyond this limit and circulates, mixing the entire lake from top to bottom. As the water warms, it creates a layer of water known as the epilimnion. The deeper you go, the colder it gets. The epilimnion then sits atop a denser, colder layer called the hypolimnion. If you’ve ever felt the cold of the lake with the tips of your toes treading water in summer, you’ll have a sense of how dramatically temperature changes with depth.

  By early summer, the epilimnion will have grown thicker as the world around it has transformed with the season. Between the epilimnion and the hypolimnion, the thermocline will have emerged: a mixed, unstable layer of water, the transitional zone of the lake. Unable to mix with the colder, denser water below, the waters at the lake’s surface circulate only within themselves, providing an ideal, warm environment for algae to bloom. It is in this summer stagnation that the lake faces the possibility of umkippen – when algae thrives in the epilimnion and starves the lake of light, leading plants to decompose and consume the lake’s oxygen. The lake can turn a stagnant green. It’s why, by September, swimming can seem so unattractive.

  But the autumn cold arrives, and wind mixes the lake again. The warmth at the surface decreases until it can no longer remain stratified from the colder water below. As the waters mix again, the lake undergoes autumn overturn.

  When the ice comes in winter, the lake faces another period of stratification. The temperature drops. Most of the lake sits around four degrees. At the very surface, just below the ice, the lake is at its coldest. Here, below the ice, the water is at its lightest. The sheet of ice floats on the lake’s coldest point, the thin realm between the ice and the depths of the lake. But this entire process is a matter of circumstance: as the climate changes, scientists worry for these winter lakes. As our winters warm, by the end of the century, the ice may not appear at all.

  —

  It’s luminous, thin, the clearest water I’ve ever seen. A tree has fallen on the lake’s edge and is alive with algae, brighter than green. The algae here get a lot of light – the clarity of the water assures it – and the green glow that blankets the tree’s branches underwater is a testament to it. It may be a species of Cladophora, which spreads its thick green filaments across fallen trees in fresh water, as well as a number of species of diatoms, unicellular green algae that thrive in Stechlin. Nearly a decade ago, scientists were raising alarms about the quality of the lake, worried that the species diversity in the nutrient-poor water was falling starkly. Cladophora algae were one of the few things thriving and were a sign of the level of disturbance in the lake. Algae can be a barometer.

  As the climate changes, the much maligned blue-green algae, Cyanobacteria, are also set to thrive. With too many nutrients, Cyanobacteria, along with other species, can bloom and saturate a body of fresh water, depriving it of oxygen as it decomposes, leading to wider problems like fish death. This is part of the process of umkippen, one of the many ways in which algae and bacteria can indicate the health of a lake. But today, the clarity of the water and the brightness of this small bloom of green are a joy to behold. It is not the choking stuff of a stagnant lake, but alive and clear. In the water, it seems aglow.

  I swim to shore, the cold slipping off my skin, and clamber back to the bench. In the air again, my wet skin cleaves tightly to my body and I shiver. Goosebumps appear across my arms, so I dress quickly, wiping the strange water from my limbs. I too feel aglow – warmth and cold rushing over my skin in tandem. This feeling will be my companion in the coming months.

  I eat my lunch on the bench, watching the mirror glass of the lake. Nothing moves. But sound continues to break the silence, echoing out over the glass as over a canyon. My fear has lifted. The quiet here isn’t an emptiness. Rather, it’s as if the forest is holding something bright and alive, and holding it very still. I wonder if I’m intruding in this place.

  I walk the forest for what feels like hours, following the trail around the lake’s edge, and then back through the woods. And then, afternoon waning, I step back on to my bike and pedal along the concrete paved road out of the trees. Just ahead of me, a flash of orange appears on the road, motionless and waiting. A fox. I keep pedalling, a movement that feels like stillness, and make eye co
ntact. We stare as the distance between us recedes. And then the fox turns – its full, copper tail cutting the air – and runs alongside me. We run in the same direction, moving in time. But the road to town is opening ahead of me. The fox steps off the pavement and into the forest, into the deep orange of the pine, and is gone.

  small intimacies

  I’ve become accustomed to solitude. The quiet swell of warmth that I know as kindness has settled on me in these moments alone. At Krumme Lake, when my terror returned, there had been a moment when all I could feel for myself was anger. Anger and shame and hatred, hot in my heart, a sharp point in between my ribcage. I was pathetic, a failure, and would never manage this stupid task. I spoke to myself pointedly, admonishingly, cruelly.

  As a child, when I would scrape a knee or bump my head, my mother would cradle me close and repeat, gently, ‘Be brave, Baobai, be brave.’ She has called me ‘baby’ in Chinese my whole life. I was the youngest. She calls my nephew Baobai now, and when she says it, we both look up.

  My mother gently asked me to be brave and held me securely. Hers was not the voice in my head. Mine was angry, punishing, violent. I’d forced myself back into the lake that day, and I’d hated every moment of it.

  Now, it feels strange to feel warmly about being with myself. The window of anger that had opened at Krumme Lake closed quickly – though it was there – and I’d found a comfort in solitude, in riding my bike across the flat Brandenburg countryside, cold wind whipping my hair and rushing into my ears. I’d found that place in the lake, and in the forest, a kind of stillness in motion.

  Today, though, I’m not alone. Coco is here, her red flash of hair dancing at the corner of my sight-line as we walk side by side. We’re planning our escape as we walk, deciding what essentials we would want to have ready for the end of the world. Having graduated into the recession and spent the past years wondering what this precarious world might hold, calamity is always at the tips of our tongues. Coco is one of the only people I can imagine fleeing with. Her company, I think, is not unlike solitude, comforting and steady. This thought sends glimmers of warmth through my body.