Lake Champlain is about 120 miles long, and 12 wide. Staring at it, all I could think was to wonder how much all that water might weigh. Then I thought about how strong the land below it would have to be hold all that water up, which led me to think about what might be below the land holding the lake up. No doubt something even stronger.
Then I suddenly thought of land masses, entire continents, and their weight. I wondered whether land must be strong to hold those lakes and oceans up, and then I also thought that somehow gravity must also push that water up to keep it from just crashing through the surface onto whatever is below, which means that gravity itself might be conflicted about whether it should always be pulling, pulling. I remembered a line from an old poem of mine about where I described rubberiness as the ground pushing up on your legs, making them fall apart like a budget sushi roll.
Everything is tethered in a contiguous way so that we are not just floating and so that there aren’t gaps between, say, the bottom of the lake and the surrounding mountains. There is no nothing, only a bunch of tight-fitting somethings. It’s all packed so tightly, and the whole arrangement just seemed so improbable that I had a short moment of awe and excitement.
Life seems best lived, to me, when those moments are earned by a little bit of inquisitiveness. I took that thought with me to the wedding, where someone – E.D.S., I think – said something about how a wedding brings together all these disparate things to create a temporary (but undeniable) whole. Even when a wedding is not electric, it can still be somehow contagious, and so I circled around the room once more, trying to hand off a potato to an unwilling mark, wondering where all that good will goes when the party evaporates.
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