Frautschi Point

"He comes out of a tuft of grass where he'd taken refuge from the heat. He's rippling over the sandy path, taking care not to stop and, for a moment, thinks he's got lost: he's landed in a footmark made by the gardener's clogs." – Jules Renard, "The Caterpillar"







There's a beach shoreline along the way to Frautschi Point in October that is hidden, ancient and rocky. The sunshine has only reached the wobbling water in patches so that the rocks in the shallows look ghostly and gray, long patches of bottom grass, dark patches that from a distance seem to be the size of a large fish wading, waiting, still. Out in the middle of the lake the sailboats ride like hung clean sheets gracefully across the sunlit blue. In the distance the horizon line of timber and shorn cliffs. Closer, there is an autumn bee at our feet. It has been prowling the torn lake grass for some sustenance. No doubt confused by changing of the seasons, the numbing cool water, it has flipped over, its wings now a nuisance, and tiny legs spiraling desperately to get right side up. We jump back, the bee, the stinging bee, so close to our cold ankles and toes. Then we see that it is in no position to chase and watch for a moment the underside complexity of this biological jewel. We offer it a thin twig. It considers it with legs and mandible. It knows nothing of us. Are we more cold waves? Are we mere fixtures of warmth? We slide the twig onto the cool sand. As the bee becomes reoriented with the steadiness of earth we see that it immediately moves back onto the untethered lakeweed seeking morsels. A small cold wave rises up and laps the bee back five inches into cool water and it flips, legs punching at the breeze. Out along the farthest point at Frautschi we see a sail scoot past the thick line of trees. It disappears as if it had never been.