Around the corner we turned and there was Lake Twentytwo

With a name like Lake Twentytwo, I didn’t expect to be blown away. On Sunday, my wife and I hiked 2.7 miles, 1,300 feet in elevation, to the base of Mount Pilchuck’s northern face with Izzy stopping to slurp crystal clear water at nearly every crossing. Unusually quiet, few of my thoughts escaped into words, sentences, and thus little conversation.

Around the corner we turned…

I don’t know why a lake perched in such a spectacular basin wasn’t given a name worthy of its beauty. I want to believe that those who named it gave up, decided to call it Lake Twentytwo because they couldn’t settle on any of the twenty-two names they scribbled down on paper; no combination of words could adequately describe what they saw.

I took a dozen photos and my wife even more, but not even the one you see here captures what I saw, the way I saw it.

Photographs capture specific moments in time and words help us describe, and together they help us imagine what was, is, or is going to be, but they cannot replace the act of being, the act of doing, the moment before, during, and after.

I, nor anyone else, can ultimately make you feel or see something in a specific way. While people may try to steer you in this direction or that, the most I can do, the only thing I want to do is create opportunities for being. I write about conversation. I capture and even collect conversations, but nothing compares to the act of conversation. Nothing compares to actually going around the corner and seeing Lake Twentytwo.

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