Where do you retreat from this complex world? How do you “draw back” (the Latin root meaning of the word) to find quiet, distance, perspective and connect with your inner world?

It was a solo retreat in the pandemic winter of 2020-21 that launched my personal relationship with the Great Lakes and established them as a place of rejuvenation and  joy. 

I spent nine and a half months of 2020 at home working full-time with a child or two by my side at various times. As a family, we reconnected with the natural world during our Pandemic Parks Tour of 2020. Between March and December that year, we visited 38 parks in Ohio (city, county, state and Cuyahoga Valley National Park). What else was there to do in those early months with then 7 and 3 year-old children?  

Many parks took us out into the woods and hills of Ohio where the Appalachian region transitions to Midwestern farm lands – truly underrated terrain in my opinion. Some of the parks were on Lake Erie. I have a picture of my older daughter from Labor Day 2020 swimming at the beach at Geneva State Park.  She looks like a Great Lakes mermaid happily lounging in clear, shallow waters stretched across an array of multicolored stones.  

However, by January 2021, the cabin fever in Cleveland was real. I had a singular workday that sent me spiraling. The intensity was a confluence of all the contextual elements of pandemic living, but for the first time in my life, I felt a loss of mental and emotional control. I knew I needed to find breathing space somewhere alone.

With the blessings of pandemic Ohio winter pricing, I rented a cottage for myself at The Lodge at Geneva-By-The-Lake an hour east of Cleveland for a Friday and Saturday night. The weather that Saturday I can only describe as somewhat magical for winter on Lake Erie. It was clear, with muted sunshine and lines and whisps of cloud. The temperature was in the high 30s, but there was absolutely no wind that day, making it feel warmer than it was. I spent three hours that morning walking in Geneva State Park along the lake, fascinated by the frozen bushes dripping with icicles, and absorbing the winter lake landscape.  

I strolled back to the beach where my Great Lakes mermaid had been swimming five months earlier and sat down. The beach was still sandy but the winter had built up snow banks at the edge of the water – large, undulating mounds of snow crusted with ice.  The lake was filled with floating ice close to the shoreline. As at any time of year by a Great Lake, there was that great, distant, unbroken dark horizon line where water meets an enormous expanse of blue sky.

The most remarkable thing about the beach that morning was the absolute, dead silence. The snow banks blocked any noise from the ice and water. The trees behind the beach had just sparse leaves, and with no wind, there was no rustling or whistling, or whispering. Once in a while I could hear a bird somewhere, calling out, but its exact location was distorted by the enveloping silence.

I was profoundly alone.  

And I was profoundly grateful.

I left the beach that day, and the cottage that weekend, having found the breathing space I needed at that moment and having an intrigue and curiosity about Lake Erie deepen into something else – a relationship that would become an anchor in my life.