The Lake Effect

“I stood ankle-deep in Lake Michigan for the first time when I was two years old,” Fred Carlisle writes. His fascination with the lake began then and has continued throughout his life.

The Lake Effect is grounded in the author’s personal experiences but moves to wider considerations that include the aesthetic, emotional, historic, economic, and social effects of Lake Michigan.

The book captures the lake’s mesmerizing beauty in summer and winter. It also examines the way Lake Michigan sustains the economies and societies of every place along its shores. It speaks of the ways human intervention and carelessness have polluted, damaged, and degraded the lake. The book also describes the lake’s power—in both water and ice forms—to drown swimmers, wreck ships, destroy beaches, and consume houses.

The Lake Effect explores as well the functions and power of water broadly. Water can be magical and make us healthier, happier, and more peaceful. It can also be an adversary that damages and destroys. Water is equally a comfort and a threat: a mosaic of multiplicity and contradiction.

Praise for The Lake Effect

A love letter to water…

In Lake Effect, Carlisle insightfully engages in the paradox of our long and complex relationship with the Great Lakes. Using memory, science, research, history, and culture to plumb the depths of his love for the lakes, he renders a stunning series of deep reflections of the “lake effect” on humanity. His interconnected chapters ask if water is the “divine gift” that is deeply compromised and now threatened, or the source of our “blue mind”—our obsession to be near water in its aesthetic richness. Or in its powerful storms and destructive forces, is it a darker magic? As he asks these questions, he places us in water-laced settings where we too can feel the nuances of our lake-longing and water use. This book reads like an exquisite essay but feels like a love letter to water.

-Anne-Marie Oomen, Author of three memoirs; a travel essay collection, An American Map; and As Long as I Know You, winner of the AWP Sue William Silverman Award for Creative Nonfiction.

The Lake Michigan Fred Carlisle brings achingly alive in these pages is both an inward lake, a wholeness and a splinter of glimpses, formed and deepened and understood over a lifetime; and an outward one, with its own complex and sometimes troubling history, its own power and force and constantly changing sublimity. The beauty of the writing rises out of its deep, wryly curious attention, alive to an ordinary world that is shot through with glimpses of the profound and the sacred. Carlisle is someone we can trust, who we would want to spend a day with, standing on a dune, pondering a ferry schedule, peering at a photo of a child and his father on the way to Wrigley Field. In reading him, we are each reminded of our own inner landscapes and their power to shape and shatter and make us new.

-Thomas Gardner, Author of Poverty Creek Journal and Sundays

Fred Carlisle evokes his lifelong fascination with Lake Michigan—“a magical, mystical lake” whose presence has had an indelible effect on his life from the earliest years of childhood. Carlisle is a gifted writer, and his prose captures the lake’s haunting beauty and mystery. What sets this memoir apart, however, and makes it so compelling is his insistence on painting the full picture of the lake’s effect—“the complex mosaic” that includes threats posed by the power and force of water and the environmental degradation of the lake caused by “the destructive effects of human intervention.” Chapter 7, “The Invasive Juggernaut: Beneath the Shimmering, Mesmerizing Surface” (on non-native and destructive species) is especially fascinating and powerful. Carlisle’s decision to write in full awareness of the ambiguities of water and of Lake Michigan makes this book particularly appealing to a wide range of readers, even those who have never had the pleasure of visiting Lake Michigan.

-Nancy Grayson, Executive editor, retired, The University of Georgia Press

Also by E. Fred Carlisle:

Hollow and Home

Hollow and Home explores the ways the primary places in our lives shape the individuals we become. It proposes that place is a complex and dynamic phenomenon. Place refers to geographical and constructed places—location, topography, landscape, and buildings. It also refers to the psychological, social, and cultural influences at work at a given location. These elements act in concert to constitute a place.
 
Carlisle incorporates perspectives from writers like Edward S. Casey, Christian Norberg-Schulz, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Witold Rybczynski, but he applies theory with a light touch. Placing this literature in dialogue with personal experience, he concentrates on two places that profoundly influenced him and enabled him to overcome a lifelong sense of always leaving his pasts behind. The first is Clover Hollow in Appalachian Virginia, where the author lived for ten years among fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-generation residents. The people and places there enabled him to value his own past and primary places in a new way. The story then turns to Carlisle's life growing up in Delaware, Ohio. He describes in rich detail the ways the town shaped him in both enabling and disabling ways. In the end, after years of moving from place to place,
 
The themes of the book transcend specific localities and speak to the relationship of self and place everywhere.

An Excerpt from Hollow and Home

It was a cold winter day — the temperature well below freezing.

We were driving into the Allegheny Mountains to look at an eighty-acre parcel in Clover Hollow, a small valley near Newport, Virginia. Four of us — Sandy, the realtor; Barbara; me; and my daughter Janey — were so squeezed together on the bench seat of an old, four-wheel-drive pickup truck that Janey had to shift positions each time Sandy shifted gears. The main roads were clear, but as soon as we turned onto county road 601, we were traveling on packed snow and ice. At the foot of the Hollow, next to the Farrier farm, Sandy stopped, climbed out, switched the front hubs to four-wheel, climbed back in, and then crept along the glazed road for the next five miles. It was not promising. Another property we had tried to buy, five minutes closer to town, seemed to stretch the limit. Now, we were crawling along the ice on a forty-five-minute trip to the far end of Clover Hollow. Barbara was anxious. Janey seemed puzzled. I was wondering why we were doing this.

Without more than a slip or two, the truck climbed the crude road the owner had bulldozed to a meadow two hundred feet above the paved county road. The rush of wonder and excitement I felt seeing the snow-covered valley and mountains in the sunlight swept away all my doubts (well, most anyway) and virtually made the decision. Within weeks, we had acquired eighty acres of mountain and meadow. We were, it is true, fifteen miles and twenty-five minutes from work. Late at night, it seemed even farther. Our access road was sometimes impassable in winter. The land maintenance requirements sometimes overwhelmed me. Yet it was the right place.

Years before, Barbara had told me about the aristocracy of effort. We were canoeing across a Killarney Provincial Park lake in Ontario on a cool, bright August day toward a small island in the middle. After three difficult portages, we could neither see nor hear anyone else. We were exhilarated by the beauty of the lake, the steep granite cliffs falling into it, and the wooded island ahead, which on that day would be ours alone. We were aristocrats in a canoe.

Each December, I would recall that first moment, seeing the mountains and valley from the truck cab and then walking to the edge of the meadow to gaze in wonder. I remember the silence — interrupted only by our voices and crunching steps in the snow. We’d found our sanctuary. During the ten years I lived there, I saw a different landscape every day, as light, weather, and seasons changed, and I heard new sounds or heard sounds differently each time I listened. But on that first day, I did not know what I was seeing — other than a stunningly beautiful landscape. I didn’t know anyone who lived in the Hollow or in the nearby village of Newport; I knew nothing about the history of the meadow where I stood or about the Hollow below; I didn’t even know the name of the place. We acquired land as strangers with neither family nor history to connect us to the mountains. We were making a superficial, aesthetic choice. We were seeking the picturesque. Nevertheless, that first time, besides being just that, marked a turning point. The meadow was my purchase — my place for exploring the spaces of my life and for discovering a people, a history, and a place.

Praise for Hollow and Home

A Powerfully Told, Beautifully Written Story of a Search for Place and Identity

In Hollow and Home: A History of Self and Place, E. Fred Carlisle makes his own "new story" out of a quintessentially American dilemma: how to locate, befriend, deepen, and claim one's sense of self while all the while moving along , shifting one's physical locations away from the very experiences and settings that have most powerfully shaped one's identity. His remarkable book invites us to join him on his pilgrimage, to travel a with him as he traces his way back to his mid-western beginnings and through the towns and cities, people and influences, and most importantly, places both literal and figurative, which so effectively ground this book, we move with him on his journey of re-discovery of his own past and its meanings, and share in his discovery of the role and power of place when he establishes and claims "

The sense of invitation to explore one's own past places and home grounds and how they have shaped us permeates this book, and for me inspired an on-going return in memory to my formative places and people, and to the houses, city neighborhoods, parks and buildings that made up my own earlier environments. This beautifully written book has a character all its own, its structure and content mirroring each other as they illuminate the writer's experience, and help us make "a new story" of our own. Simply put, I have loved reading and re-reading and thinking about this book that speaks so powerfully and insightfully of the most commonly shared American experience--the search for place and self.

-MC Nick

An Antidote to Trying Times

Into this tough world of relentless displacements and dislocations comes a book of straightforward gifts, and its most lasting one is its courtship of what coaches memory toward the heart of belonging.

Small Ohio towns and rural mountain hollows cradle what's left of an older kind of home that survives in half-remembered stories, postcards and memorabilia, and nostalgic romances. This book knows all of that, and straddles real memories, and a newer way of keeping oneself centered amid the general heartlessness of the way we live now. It's not a self-help book, though it makes you wise enough to do without one. It's not a bath in dream world reveries, though it talks eloquently with the bundle of anxieties and desires that lie behind the nostalgic drive.

Carlisle's Hollow and Home is a perfect gift for the season of reflection.

-Professor X

Updating Wilder’s “Our Town”

Home and Hollow is in the "Our Town" genre. As such, it succeeds on several levels. The sentences move nicely along the page and readers can see each scene perfectly well. Also like Wilder's book, one reacts by thinking along with the lead character(s) in the discussion, about how their environment or "place" has shaped them, and how they then interpret its meaning. The author acts as both participant and observer, a useful guide on a journey into self-understanding that will appeal to a broad audience. It is at once a personal memoir and a probing exploration of a common American experience.

-Lloyd Gardner