[FMAL-17] God Bless The Lake
Bernard, Fondue/Lake, seventeenth email.
My mother is a lake swimmer. I grew up with the sight of her looking up at me on the dock, calling me in, laughing when I refused and went to hide with a book somewhere shaded. She made my sisters and I pack bathing suits everywhere. In the summers, when we were in the city, we lived at the pool. When we went on vacation, it was to some sort of beach, or a cottage near a lake. Every hotel we stayed at had to have a pool.
She taught me not to be afraid of lakeweed, and to wear decent sunscreen, and not to care when people said the water is too cold. Even a dip counts. When I was seventeen, I remember she and I going down to the water at a friend’s cottage and breaking a thin sheet of ice with our feet to get into the shallows, and thinking, damn it; I’ve been converted.
My mother has given me many gifts, but this is the one I thank her for today.
When I lived in Oxford, I had a crush on a girl who invited me to go swimming with her in the rivers most mornings, even through the winters. I would wait for her on the sun-dappled fence along Jackdaw Lane, the football field growing warm with early morning light. We would walk into the woods along a muddy path to the canal by the Isis, drop our things by a tree, and slip in. I usually yelped. She usually laughed. She would bring tea and I would bring cake, and as our skin was red and singing we would get dressed and sip from thermoses, and talk about our lives. She left for Maine later that year, and I left for Quebec, and we haven’t seen each other since those days. But cold water always reminds me of her.
And today, after a blessed eight hours of sleep, I woke up, ate an orange, got my kit together, and made my way through the traffic down to the lakeside, where middle-aged men in lycra were speeding through red lights on off-brand road bikes, and old Italian men were scoping out swan eggs in their abandoned nests, to go to the Bain des Pâquis. Friends, there was the lake.
Rough pebble beach, soft slope down to the ice bath that awaited me, the horizon crowned with mountains and early spring fog. I swam for some blessed minutes. I felt alive in all parts of myself. And then I got out and towelled off and felt finally ready for the day.
Today is the last day of the conference—the SBI ended last night, after six extra hours of fighting over how the CBD would help the new (and still inexistent) biodiversity framework collaborate with all of the other parts of the UN. We were at the conference centre til one AM. At one point, the security guard came in to check our badges and told us that we were probably the only ones working in the building, apart from her.
The Open-Ended Working Group on the GBF is going to half-finish its job. I have to gather my thoughts for our big old analysis, so I won’t say too much more, but—we’re almost certainly going to have another meeting before the COP in China; it’s almost certainly going to be in Nairobi. A lot of recommendations to the COP still have loads of brackets in them. Everything got talked about; nothing is decided.
I was speaking to a delegate yesterday who reminded me of Bill McKibben’s saying: winning slowly is the same as losing. As it is for climate change, so for biodiversity.
Looking at the mountains on the other side,
B