Swimming to Mouse Island

Creative Non-Fiction by Mary Grimm 

Northeast Ohio Writer

​The water of Lake Erie then was murky. When we stood in the shallows under the hot blue sky, the plane of the surface cut us off, seemingly, at the knees. We couldn’t see our feet, although we knew intimately the feel of the hard, wave-cut ridges of sand under them. The water was so opaque that it might have been solid. If it was in fact solid we could have walked to Mouse Island, and maybe we dreamed of this in the narrow beds of our vacation cottage. 

We had had swimming lessons at the Y. We could do the front crawl, the back stroke, and the side stroke. We weren’t good at the butterfly. We didn’t like to swim in water where we couldn’t touch bottom: there was no telling what was down there. The probability of fish was something we didn’t wish to have proved.

Possibly we didn’t actually believe we could swim to Mouse Island.  It looked close but we were never good at estimating distance. If there was a grade on our report cards for spatial awareness we would have gotten an Unsatisfactory. We stayed close to the beach where our parents and our aunts and our grandmother sat on red and white striped beach towels spread on the hot white rocks. 

Once one of us lost a ring in the water, the sort of ring given to you by a boy in high school, which is too big and therefore likely to slide off your ring finger when you are engaged in a splash war. We searched for it by diving, eyes wide open, until the water was full of rucked-up sand. One of us found it by touch, with her foot. It showed, we said, that they were meant to be, and they were, until they broke up some months later. 

Mouse Island appeared to us as a sort of cushion made of trees. No house or building of any kind was visible. The trees came right down to the lip of the water. We speculated that it was named because of its resemblance to a mouse seen in profile, crouched, head down, so that its body made a curve that was lower at one end. Much later some of us learned that it was so named for its small size: only seven acres. It was once owned by a president, one of those who had a beard. There is a reef between Mouse Island and the shore which is a hazard to watercraft. 

We said we wanted to swim to Mouse Island because it looked so deceptively close. Because we thought we could make it there with the aid of our innertubes or other flotation devices. Because we were bored. Because it looked friendly, its mouse face leaning down to the water to drink. Because we wanted to make our excitable aunts shriek. If we didn’t manage it, we knew, the waves would bring us back to the rocky beach, because it is the way of waves, always to move toward the shore, soughing and rattling the rocks.

When the president with the beard owned Mouse Island, he and his sons built two cabins, a boat house, a dock, and an ice house. There was a tennis court: if you hit the ball too hard it might sail out into the lake. Although he was a Republican, he believed in equal treatment for all, regardless of wealth or race. 

If we did swim to Mouse Island, what then? Maybe we dreamed of this when vacation was over, when we were sleeping in our own beds, unready to be shaken awake at an early hour to eat breakfast before school. We dreamed that we would walk through the trees to the center of the island and build a fire, or a hut. That we would live there with just our child selves, barefoot and in our bathing suits.  On Mouse Island it would always be summer, the kind of summer where the sky is blue and full of clouds that sail across it slowly. We would never leave until we had somehow grown up to be beautiful and wise. 

Once, one of us lost control of his flotation device, a killer whale. There was a stiff breeze and it moved over the water in a stately but determined manner. We watched from the shore as the whale went out into the lake past Mouse Island, on its way to Canada.

Years later we sat on the rocky beach as our parents used to sit, in the meager shade of a half dead tree, and watched our daughters swimming out, pointed toward Mouse Island. Lying on the water, their heads were wet and sleek, as if they had become sea creatures. Already they were far enough out that they could pretend they didn’t hear us when we called for them to come back. 

Mary Grimm

Mary Grimm has had three books published, Left to Themselves, Transubstantiation, and Stealing Time. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Antioch Review, and the Mississippi Review, as well as in a number of journals that publish flash fiction, including Helen, The Citron Review, and Tiferet. Currently, she is working on a series of climate change novellas set in past and future Cleveland.