Electric Lake

This is the lake we went swimming in on our next-to-last day of vacation, east of Berlin, close to the Polish border.

This was a lake no one had been to. There was a map, but it was, as it turned out, not drawn to scale. Rumor had it that this lake was so clear you could see all the way to the bottom, which was made of stones, rather than the thick murky sand giving way to clusters of algae at the nearby lake.

To get to this lake we had to go to the end of the cornfield, then turn into the woods. At one point it seemed like we were walking for much longer than the ambiguous map seemed to indicate. Then in the middle of the wood a car appeared, with a German couple. We asked them about the lake. At first they thought we were talking about a very different lake 30 kilometers away, but after much discussion and map consultation they figured out what we were talking about.

There is a lake up there, they said. But it's not finished yet. It's a man-made large lake and they are still finishing it. You can swim there but the problem is, there is an electrical cable under it, and it is okay now, but it could break any day, and then all the water in the lake will be charged with electricity.

After a picnic in a sunny clearing in the forest we found the lake. It was large, blue, and beautiful, although the bottom was still sand, and there was algae, and also giant reeds that looked like velvet hot dogs. On the other side of the lake, an excavator and some other machinery idled. Old pipes in bleacher formation, heated by the sun, made for a perfect bench.

We went swimming in the cold water that contained occasional surprise warm stream stripes. There was just sun on the water, and old metal pipes that were so warm they almost lulled you to sleep. The guys read Hesse and Artaud. The kids climbed up and down a steep sandhill lined with twisted tree roots and yellow flowers, and broke apart the velvet reeds, which appeared to be filled with feathers. And maybe there was a subterranean electrical current somewhere deep below the lake, but there was no electricity in the water.