I’ve picked up sections of this trail throughout my swims: many of the lakes circling the city fall along its route. The trail markers – a blue circle in a white square – appear faded, painted on to trees in most of the forests around the city. Despite their haggard appearance, the trail isn’t old.
Manfred Reschke, the author of my trail guide, now in his seventies, marked the trail some years after reunification. Reschke grew up in West Berlin. The world of water in Brandenburg was beyond the Wall, but West Berliners, unlike their Eastern neighbours, could cross the border by train, car or foot. Reschke, I learned, took to walking across and taking hiking trips throughout the Brandenburg countryside. The landscape that so many sought to leave was the very place he was headed. The 66-Seen-Wanderung is just one of the trails marked by him.
Today I plan to walk a ten-kilometre section of it, repeating a walk I’ve done before that should, if all goes well, lead me to one of the best lakes I’ve known. The lake isn’t on the trail, but hidden nearby, a treasure off the map. It’s hard to find.
It starts with a marsh. Birch wood gives way to straight, skinny alder, sunken deep in the marsh along the River Briese, which cuts north of the city. A successional stage between swamp and forest, this Erlenbruchwald is known in English as a ‘carr’. Like ‘Berlin’, ‘carr’ basically means ‘swamp’.
The trail follows the river, winding its way sidelong across Brandenburg. It’s a strip of dry ground amidst water: the carr is high in winter, with opaque, still water rising to the trunks of the alders. I imagine the sensation of water rising high around the trees, and it feels like hands wrapped around my waist, too intimate, too close. The carr is all sensation, swans moving silently between the trees, water glistening with an oily slickness. It’s beautiful and repulsive at once.
I follow the trail eastwards to the end of the carr, where the trees begin to thin. Upriver from Birkenwerder is a series of grassy fields, desiccated swathes of gold amidst the marsh and plantation pines. It’s unseasonably warm, and by the time the dirt trail opens on to a sunny sand track, it’s noon. There’s a white hot sun and no cloud. There is no one to be seen.
I follow the track – the brightness of the daylight reflected off the white sand – past a farmhouse from which I hear only roosters calling, the occasional cry in what feels like summer air. An electrical line running alongside me is buzzing where it meets the pylon. I find a rhythm in the sound, as I’ve found my rhythm in walking, and in the buzzing haze of the clearing I begin to sing to myself.
I was here a little over a year ago with Jacob. We’d walked for hours, searching for Lubowsee. He’d led us into a field lined with signs warning about wild boar, convinced the lake was at its other end. It was, but the Briese, which runs through the field, had turned the ground to marsh. We sank in up to our ankles. That was an unseasonably warm day too.
The German word for treasure is Schatz. I think of it as I’m walking, remembering that first visit to Lubowsee. It had been hot, and we were lost. The lake had receded from us in the heat, and appeared through the trees only once we’d given up. A single dock appeared out of nowhere, as if by magic, stretching out from the trees and over the lake. Seeing it, we ran towards it, throwing off our clothes, diving in. The water was bright and warm, as though its surface were stitched with gold leaf.
I’m looking for the dock again today, straining to remember the point in the pines where the trail branched off. I see the signs for the 66-Seen-Wanderung turning north, and I know this is where I leave the trail. Instead, I walk east, through a cathedral of pine. The trees form long corridors through the wood, and I follow one in what I remember is the direction of the lake. The trees become more errant here and begin to sway and creak above me. Despite the warmth, the sun sits too low in the sky to reach the ground, and I have the sensation of clawing my way through a dark wood in search of light. The earth is grown over with moss, and tiny skeletons of bilberry brush at my ankles. I begin to wonder if the lake was never really here, an optical illusion, a trick of my memory. Memory has begun to feel like a filter, a haze obscuring sight. But I know it’s a lake that hides.
Without warning, the glint of golden light appears through the trees: the lake, and a few yards along, the dock. I walk out on to it and find it much the same as I’d left it last autumn, a single spider web stretched between the bars of the rusted ladder, vibrating in the air. I touch it with my fingertips and move it aside, peering over the edge into the water. The ladder’s pattern of rust red and peeling white paint is exactly as I remember it.
I slip out of my clothes and climb down, lowering myself into the water, and swimming out backwards. It is a temperature between cold and cool, light on the skin. The water smells of grass and is the colour of butterscotch. Swimming here there’s only the sound of my toes kicking at the surface, as if the lake is sheltered from the surrounding forest by the same magic that kept it hidden from view. I swim until my legs grow tired, then clamber back on to the dock, cold and exhausted. It feels as good today as it did a year ago. I breathe the sun in great gulps, then lie stretched on my back, grateful to be here alone.
—
Once I’d grown comfortable in Chocolate Lake, I’d begun exploring. The rocky landscapes inland from Halifax harbour were spotted with lakes, marine-blue patches of water edged with wild blueberry bushes. It wasn’t a perfect solution. I would bike to William’s Lake, half an hour outside of town, and find myself too terrified to get in. I’d sit on the rocks by the shore, dipping my feet in the cold. The lake there was immediately deep, slipping directly off the edges of the rock and into the bottomless blue that had scared me as a child.
Once in a while, feeling brave, I would slide in and paddle near the rocks, staying in for no more than a minute. When I swam like that, I would stop breathing, as if it might hold the terror at a distance long enough for me to clamber back on to the rocks and back to safety. I did it again and again, unwinding the knots of terror.
I kept swimming in Chocolate Lake at night, leaving my clothes piled on the empty lifeguard station and swimming out into the black. On clear nights, the sky would be doubled around me, and the feeling of depth would turn into weightlessness, like I was floating in space. In the darkness, the border between water and air seemed to disappear, the sensation of the lake on my skin fleeing along with sight. The lake at night was like a vacuum, vacated of fear.
Night swimming became a small gift, a treasure I learned to reserve for the best days. They’re rare. The summer before I first moved to Berlin, when I’d gone back to Halifax for my divorce, my friends and I walked for an hour to go night swimming in Chocolate Lake. I hadn’t swum there in seven years, and I’d underestimated the length of the walk. We arrived exhausted, feet sore, in the middle of the night. It was freezing cold for August, but as we sat cross-legged and shivering, drying off by the lake, we all agreed it had been worth it.
Between Berlin lakes this August, I flew home to Canada to spend a week at the cottage with family. At night, the sky there is as black and clear as the lake. I spent the nights there swimming naked, floating on my back, watching the darkness. From the water’s surface, the full curve of the Earth appeared, a stretching, star-streaked dome spinning overhead. It reminded me of those early days in Krumme Lanke, when I first arrived in Berlin. I lay still, searching for meteors.
The Perseids appear every August, flashing brightly across the sky as they burn up in our atmosphere. I’ve looked for them each summer since I was a teenager and suspect I always will. What we see isn’t the meteoroid, but its burn: dust and ice singeing in the air, streaking brightly across the sky. I sometimes think their serendipitous flashes mark a stitch between our first record of them, two thousand years ago, and me. Ancient Chinese astronomers saw over a hundred of them, and their annual reappearance links us: them, in my maternal grandparents’ lost homeland, and me, floating in the water. They link me to every summer that has passed.
As I lingered at the lake’s
surface, my black hair drifted into a fluid crown. The Milky Way stretched an icy glow across the night and the black of the lake swallowed me. Swaddled in darkness, there was only the sound of the water on my ears, and in the stillness I waited for shooting stars to light the seam between lake and sky.
grey
I wake up grey and weighty. I’d been up late the night before, watching the news of an attack unfold in Paris. The newscasters had talked over the gunfire footage, then panned to a shot of a single running shoe left on the pavement. Friends had checked in on Facebook, letting the digital world know they were safe. The real world seems small these days.
I roll over and see a message from my dad. He wants me to stay safe, it says, and to stay away from public places. He’s thousands of miles away, watching the news, transmitting his worry across the ocean by fibre-optic cables sunken deep underwater. His worry reaches me in a bubble of grey on my phone, like a diver surfacing from the depths.
I don’t want to stay home. I want to shake off this feeling of discomfort, so I pack my lunch and set out towards Alexanderplatz. It’s empty for a Saturday morning, a few tourists strewn about snapping pictures of the Fernsehturm. I drift past them and into the station.
The train drops me in Rangsdorf, thirty kilometres south of the city. A busy road cuts the town in half: on one side sit rows of East German apartment blocks, and on the other side the sprawl of suburban houses and pine trees. It reminds me of the neighbourhood I grew up in, big houses with empty yards, pine trees marking the property lines. The air smells sweet, of smoke and pine resin.
I make my way down towards the lake and find it windswept and grey. November is nearing its end, winter rolling in. On the beach, a dozen or so men are standing in wetsuits, watching windsurfers and kitesurfers skid across the shallows. I wander over and ask in German if it would be okay to swim here.
‘Yes, but it’s cold, you know,’ replies one of the men in perfect English, his hair still wet. He has peeled his wetsuit from his torso, and it hangs limply around his waist.
‘I know,’ I explain, annoyed at the change in language. I should work on my accent. ‘I swim all winter.’ He shrugs in reply, so I wander to the very edge of the beach, away from the surfers and up against a patch of reeds.
I strip off and step out into the water. The wind is working the lake into small, forceful waves, but I plough through them, walking towards its centre. Fifty yards out, the depth rises only to my knees, so I relent and lie down flat in the shallows. It’s a lake so shallow that it risks deoxidising each summer; the kind of lake scientists call hypertrophic. Too many nutrients in too shallow a space. The fish here risk dying. When winter sets in, it will be a world of near solid ice.
I try to swim, but the rough wind sends cold water rushing into my mouth. I paddle awkwardly against the waves, but the shallowness of the water makes it difficult to float. It’s too choppy, and the surfers are sliding ever closer, so I stand up again, frustrated, and make my way back to shore. The sensation of cold slips off my skin as I dry in the wind, and as I slip back into my clothes, I see the men across the beach shaking their heads, bemused.
—
The summer before my final year at university, I took to swimming in the sea. My rages softened and dissipated. The coast of Nova Scotia dipped southwards, curving in small grey crescents along the salty cold of the North Atlantic. Granite, slate and sandstone crackle across the landscape, making the ground rugged, sharp-edged like the air. It was always a bit cold, even in summer. The ocean would sting my legs as I swam, but I would wade out and stay afloat until my fingers were numb. The water calmed me. On the beach, I would dry in the wind and the sun, letting the salt form crystals in my hair.
One of those days, I went to the beach with the man who I would marry. He was eight years older than me, dark and moody and alluring, and I, at twenty, fell immediately in love. I hadn’t felt anything like it before. I was shy and nervous around him. When he came to the coffee shop I worked at, I would hide behind the concrete wall and ask my colleagues to serve him. He told me later that he loved the way I became awkward and sweet with him, like he had softened my difficult edges into fluid curves. We were two unstable forces drawn together, but with him, I learned to become the steady one, the person who held things in place. He was the anchor I’d longed for.
We spent that summer making love, and then sitting on the floor of his empty, unfurnished apartment, eating unsweetened cereal covered with maple syrup. We laughed and laughed, and then tried to sleep but had sex instead. I learned that he smelled of lavender, dry cotton and the sea. On long drives at night, listening to The Magnetic Fields, he held my hand when ‘The Book Of Love’ came on and would sing along in a comedic, low voice. We walked along the foggy arm of ocean that stretched around the city, listening to the floating buoy bells at night. The beginnings of our relationship were swaddled in that harbour fog, a moment of stillness before everything changed.
—
We’re taking the S-Bahn north, up along the Havel towards Schulzendorf. Anne is with me; after our swim in the summer, she’s offered to join me again. She wants to swim through winter, but has never made it past November. I’ve promised her that it’ll be easy, so long as she keeps swimming regularly. In any case, I’m glad for the company.
The winter is settling over Berlin. The blustery weather from the other week has held over, and today the sky hangs low and spits fat, cold raindrops. Everything is grey.
The road from the S-Bahn station takes us westward, under a railway bridge and past a rusting condom machine, which Anne laughs at.
‘It’s so Brandenburg,’ she says simply.
We follow the road through the suburbs, past houses still sleeping through Sunday morning. A kilometre along, we come to an enormous allotment, one of Berlin’s many Kleingärten designed to provide city dwellers with access to outdoor space. Next door is an FKK sports club, outside of which a flag waves, painted with a golden figure leaping over a globe. A naturist sauna and sports club, it’s one of the many cultural relics of the East, sitting quietly next to the allotment. Anne tells me about her childhood in the West, about holidays in France where she swam naked in the sea. West Germans are known for the same prudishness as the English and Americans, but she didn’t grow up that way, she says. I peer through the fence of the sport club. It’s empty.
We follow the lane through the allotments. They’re the most perfectly formed gardens I’ve seen: tiny, tile-roofed houses set into small lawns, paved roads lined with iron street lamps. Everything is near miniature, almost life-sized but not big enough for every day. Their low gates are mostly locked.
The fences of the gardens back on to the lake, and we’re looking for a way in. Around the eastern side, there’s a small beach, but it’s padlocked and lined with barbed wire. Heiligensee is a private lake, with access restricted to those who own lake-shore property. I ask Anne if she’s okay with trespassing, and she laughs.
‘Of course, that’s why I’m here!’ she says brightly.
We wind our way back to the gardens and hoist ourselves up over the steely grey fence. Its slats are narrow, so Anne takes off her shoes and passes her bag overtop. On the other side, it’s another world: wind-blown water and a quiet dock. Shiny steel ladders dip down into the grey.
We pile our clothes in the order we’ll put them on in. When your hands are stiff with cold, preparation means everything. Stripped down to my swimsuit, I climb down off the dock and into the water. As I swim out, the grey of the lake appears black, clear and clean but immeasurably deep, overwhelmingly cold. I can’t stay in long; the winter has arrived, and I swear into the wind. The pain slides down my ankles and into my feet. My fingertips grow thick and clumsy with numbness. Thin, spitting rain blows across the lake’s surface.
I clamber back out into the wind and dry off, cold pleasure spreading across my back, watching Anne swim. She swims out a way, with none of the profanities and complaints that accompanied my swim. She’
s tougher than me, I think; she handles the cold a little better. A good friend to have around as winter widens ahead of me.
—
Part way through that last year at university in Nova Scotia, I was accepted on to a post-graduate course in London and began making plans to leave Canada. I was going to a land I chose for myself: small, rolling, and eternally green. My parents worried. It was a place I was never meant to go back to, as if back–tracking in our family history was the ultimate transgression. At the time, none of that crossed my mind; I worried about my relationship, about him.
I threw myself into work again, and as my plans began to materialise, my boyfriend decided to come with me. I would study and find some part-time work, and he would begin his career. Relieved, I packed my things and moved to London. He followed a few weeks later.
On that small island, the winter barely spread its breath across the south. When the crocuses peeked through in February, it was still glowing green. There was dampness there, but it afforded a kind of beauty, a cloak of mossy green across the crumbling brick terraces. We moved from a tiny rented flat in Kentish Town to a larger flat in Dartmouth Park, near Hampstead Heath. It had a broken window, but it also had crown mouldings and a shining marble fireplace, so we loved it. It had a view over the garden, our small patch of green in the grey city. We walked across the Heath every night after dinner, every night passing the same old man with a pug which clutched in its mouth an enormous ball. The man sat on the bench waiting for his dog to catch up to him; we laughed about it every night, eating ice cream, holding hands. It was good for a while.
We got married – a paper act – when I was twenty-three, and from then on I tethered myself to the ship’s mast of our relationship, like Ulysses, like Turner. I watched our relationship unfold itself, unable to do anything about it. He retreated into a place inside himself, neither softness nor hard work could fix it. He drank, and he disappeared. I began to wonder if this was the same person I’d loved back in Nova Scotia, the man who had smelled of lavender and the sea.
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