Don’t drink the water, anymore | Ammi Midstokke

Apparently, there are no brain eating amoeba in Lake Pend Oreille. Yet. According to Health & Welfare’s recreational water reports, the only water warning on the lake right now is about how many pounds of trout and whitefish one ought to limit themselves to per month (one and five, respectively).

With all the lake water I’ve been swallowing and my sun-leathered forehead, I worried I was beginning to have a few too many things in common with RFK Jr. These are the things I think about while my face is submerged in the cool, clear waters of our vast lake. Head down, bubbles out, Could I work out in blue jeans? Head up, air in. Wow those Green Monarchs are beautiful.

Swimming along the stoney beaches of Green Bay and paddling under the jagged cliffs of Mineral Point, the clarity and cleanliness of the water made me wonder if I could drink it. Then I wouldn’t have to bring extra fluid behind me, which I was towing in a floating buoy that should make me slightly more visible to boats. The experts say that drinking clean lake water is still not recommended, and the last thing one wants while trapped in a wetsuit is gastrointestinal distress.

After making a few tepid and brackish creek-bed memories in California as a youth, we moved to North Idaho when I was seven. My dad promised the lake water was so clean, you could drink it, but we never had to. We lived up the mountain from the shore and drank unfiltered creek water, stored in five-gallon drums and then a 1,500 gallon tank. Whatever parasites the lake might carry, they could not compete with the late summer, slow stream Giardia hydration I was raised on.

I don’t remember the first time I swam in Lake Pend Oreille, but I do recall marveling at how clear the water was, how I could open my eyes and see all the round rocks or jagged boulders beneath the surface. In the summer, this was how we bathed. Dad sometimes even brought a bottle of shampoo to lather up his long, blond hair.

I learned to skip rocks out at Green Bay, and watched my family jump off the cliffs there with great hoots and hollers. All the kids of the area were out there on summer days, looking for a higher point to jump from, and when the highest had been discovered, performing more daring tricks.

Then my Uncle Tom came to visit. He’s best described as the hype-man in the ticket line of a circus, possibly on uppers. He clambered up that cliff in his goofy shorts, chortling and stubbing his toes and nearly falling off a dozen times. The kids watched half terrified that he’d miss a step and tumble down the cliffs in a horrific smearing of flesh and blood and shredded swim trunks. He stood on the edge of a rock on his tippy-toes, doing some sort of Three Stooges ballet ritual to summon up courage while the kids jeered.

Uncle Tom sucked a breath, bent his knees, and then launched off the rock into the abyss of air, arms extended as if he was going to leap over something else or just fly off. In a smooth movement, he tucked his knees and wrapped his arms, turned into a spinning ball, flipped twice, straightened into a human bullet, and pierced the water with knifelike hands.

Silence on the cliffs.

Uncle Tom had been a diver in college, and though he was usually an embarrassment to us, after that we made his annual summer visits a matter of lakeshore legend. It was the only time we were willing to admit we were related.

My brother and I also tried to swim down at Sourdough Point, but not belonging to the HOA, were often reminded that this lakefront and these tennis courts were for those who paid dues. So we found other nearby stretches of rock we could bike or walk to, until those, too, became labeled as “private access only,” or some similar derivative that separates the haves from the have-nots.

What people often fail to understand is that access encourages use, use encourages connection, connection encourages conservation. Whether one owns a strip of shore or paddles the public waterways, we can all agree that this clean water is a precious resource we want to preserve.

That’s why projects like the Kaniksu Land Trust’s Lake Pend Oreille Water Trail, and others, are so important. They map out public access to waterfront areas, educate about water cleanliness and lake safety, and connect us to the incredible heritage of the tribes who were using these waters long before we drew property lines around them. Back then, there were no warnings about how much trout you could eat in a month.

Treading toward Mineral Point, I sunk my face into the water and watched the world below float by. I saw tiny fish and prehistoric seams in the stone. I tried to lift a random pipe that had fallen to the bottom from somewhere, probably a building site above me. I imagined whoever dropped the pipe looking over the edge and thinking, “Well, I guess that’s gone.” But it’s not gone. It will be there long after both of us are, though.

There was a neighborhood recently that put up a “private access only” sign on their street ending at the lake. They said it was just to keep people off their lawns, but that wasn’t the implied message. If you were a literate child, the sign said, “This lake is not for you.” If people aren’t using the lake, they’ll not have the opportunity to learn how to care for it, or appreciate the importance of doing so.

These deep, clean waters are not a given anymore, but a privilege and a rarity. Swim in them, teach your grandchildren to dive for trash, but don’t swallow too much. Those days have already passed.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com