The Places That Remember Us

I looked deep into the dark grey, almost black, River water the other day. I mean deep into it.

Not looking at it, exactly, but into it, as if water had depth beyond its own depth, and in that I saw 40 years of my life in the North Country reflecting back at me.

But not like time had passed. More like time was still there somehow, suspended, if that makes any sense.

Getting older now, I feel my bones in this place. My actual bones. The way they move over old stone, old docks, old pine roots, old paths I have walked for so many years, I no longer know whether I am remembering them, or they are remembering me.

That is the thing about the River. It does not simply move. It carries. It carries freighters and driftwood and gulls and storms and time and boys who became men and fathers who become old enough to understand that the world was speaking the whole time.

We just didn’t know how to listen.

Sometimes I think if we could just listen, and see what we see, we would know. We would grasp the language that defines us. It is a common language, but not an easy one. Water. Sky. Trees. Granite. Wind. A buoy in the distance. A freighter horn so deep it feels less like sound than something that brings us home.

Have you ever looked up at the stars and admitted you just don’t know enough?

I mean, really admitted it. Not pretended. Not said what you thought you were supposed to say. Just stood there under all of that and said, quietly, I don’t know enough.

That is not defeat. It is a beginning.

Life unveils itself. Your way. My way. In its quiet, unexpected ways. It doesn't ask permission. It simply keeps arriving.

I grew up on Chautauqua Lake, and I suppose that is where it all began for me. Though I didn’t know it then. Children rarely know what is shaping them. They think they are just swimming, fishing, listening to screen doors slam, watching parents carry coolers and folding chairs, smelling outboard motor gas and lake weeds and summer rain.

But a lake is never just a lake.

Chautauqua Lake was my first sanctuary, my first language. A lake divided in itself, with a deeper northern basin and a shallower southern one, the narrow passage near Bemus Point acting almost like a hinge between them. Water moving. Weather shifting. Ice forming. Sediment settling. Algae blooming. The whole thing alive, even when it looked still.

Chautauqua sits near the great divide of waters. So much of western New York seems to belong to the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence, moving north and east toward the Atlantic. But, Chautauqua’s waters move another way, south into the Mississippi basin, toward the Gulf of Mexico.

As a boy, I did not care much about watersheds. I cared about docks and boats and whether the day would hold. But now I understand the lesson hidden in all of it.

What appears to be one thing is often several things. What appears still is moving. What appears separate is connected.

Maybe that is why the River made sense to me when I came to it. Not immediately. But in the deeper way places either accept you or they don’t.

The River is different from Chautauqua Lake. It’s darker, heavier, and more dramatic. It has a continental seriousness to it. The River does not ask to be pretty, though it is stunning. The River has work to do. It moves ships. It holds borders. It remembers war, trade, ice, engines, lost villages, blasted channels, locks, families, weddings, storms.

My wife’s family’s summer home is built on a hill on Idle Isle, on old rock, the kind of granite and ancient earth that makes you feel temporary. The islands all come out of this same granite rock. So do the houses. So do the families, in a way. Not born from it, exactly, but fastened to it, even if just for a time.

A few weeks before Amy and I were married on Idle Isle, under a pine tree canopy on the front porch, a wind shear ran through the island. We spent days clearing debris before the wedding. Looking back, it feels like a rite of passage now. On our wedding day, while celebrating our vows, we learned a hurricane had struck Bermuda, our well-planned honeymoon spot. This all stood there as witness.

My father traveled back with us to our apartment in Boston after the wedding and gave us the money to go to Aruba instead.

How did I not see it then?

Weather. Family. The River. Plans redirected. My father. The day itself. Everything was speaking. The way the River and life say, not that way, this way.

I heard it all speaking, maybe. But I did not yet know the language.

Water here appears to move forward. But it also turns inward at times. It circles. It catches memory and holds it. A morning on the River can feel connected to a morning many years ago.

Chautauqua has its own quiet cadence. Mist lifting. Frozen docks returning each spring like memory resurfacing. But the River teaches life more dramatically. Ships become clocks. Seasons become bells. Water stores repetition.

That may be why people who belong to lakes and rivers speak about them as if they are alive. Not metaphorically, but structurally. They carry accumulated time the way a tree carries rings. Like how an eddy of time is motion that remembers. Holds.

On our island, there is a lamp. I imagine it has been here forever, since the beginning. For years I thought it was simply decoration. Only recently did I really see it. The base is a ceramic sailor behind a ship’s wheel, bravely gripping a wheel and weathering a storm.

Our kitchen has dishes that go back to whenever. There are coffee mugs and wine glasses that pre-date my existence. There’s silverware in drawers with origin that escapes me. And, nothing matches in the way new things match, but everything belongs in the way old things belong.

These are not antiques. They are witnesses to things I’m only beginning to understand. I just now see it and try to make sense of it all.

The other morning, I stood barefoot at the end of our island in our gazebo. I was present. My feet were firmly planted. A freighter was moving through the channel. I waved to the captain, and he blew the horn.

A small thing, unless you know. Unless you have stood somewhere long enough to understand that nothing is small when it carries enough time.

Maybe that's what places do. They don't simply remember us. They wait patiently until we're finally able to remember them.

By Mark E. Russell

Mark Russell is a graduate of St. Lawrence University and the Western New England School of Law, and has applied legal precision and narrative clarity to every venture he’s led, from early startups to global agencies and now to CatalystXL, the software-as-a-service company he founded to simplify how organizations communicate and operate. Russell has written for multiple publications — among them Detroit’s TBD Magazine — and contributed to Mastering Communication at Work along with two chapters in the New York Times bestseller, Spend Shift. He lives in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan, with his wife, Amy Saunders Russell, their three River Rat children — Emma, Sam, and Trey — and their miniature schnauzer, Stella. The Russells divide their time between their home overlooking Lake St. Clair and their summer island retreat, Idle Isle, on the St. Lawrence River.

Header photograph is the sunrise at the southern end of Idle Isle. Photo courtesy of the Russell family album.