The Lake Where You Live

It’s hard to envision a bleaker landscape than a frozen, snow-covered lake. And yet, under that expanse of white lies a world still teeming with life. You know that especially if you’ve ever drilled a hole in the ice, sent a jig down to near the bottom, felt a twitch on the rod and reeled in a multi-colored bluegill or vividly speckled crappie.

It’s worth remembering, here at Christmas time, just what a gift we have in these lakes that some of us call home and others love visiting. I think back on how it all came to be. About ten thousand years ago, glaciers a mile or more thick covered this land. The climate warmed, the glaciers retreated, and the melt water filled the depressions they left behind.

Over centuries these puddles of glacial water became living systems, filled with all manner of flora and fauna. When our first child (daughter Sonya) was born, I stopped to think what a miracle it was to have this tiny being emerge after nine months from her mother’s belly, fully alive and complete, everything functioning: arms and legs, fingers and toes, eyes, ears, heart, lungs, vocal cords.

A lake is a similar kind of miracle, a world that grew up naturally, a web of interdependent relationships, enormously complex yet somehow self-sustaining. Even here in winter, it’s all there, life surviving in a darkened world that to warm-blooded creatures like us is forbiddingly cold.

The fish, turtles, frogs, crayfish, mussels and insects can live because the oxygen they need is dissolved in the water. In fact, there’s more of it now than in summer: water around the freezing point of 32 degrees F holds almost twice as much oxygen as it would at, say, 80 degrees in the middle of summer.

The fish continue to feed, moving around sluggishly, their cold-blooded metabolism slowed down by the low temperature. The water plants have largely died back, but their sources of rebirth remain, in rhizomes buried in the sediment, in seeds and turions (winter buds) scattered on the bottom.

The microscopic algae have died off, too, though not completely. Enough remain to rebuild their population when the ice goes away, the water arms, and sunlight once more penetrates deep. The algae will use that energy source to make food through photosynthesis. 

Little zooplankton will feast on the algal cells and in turn become food for juvenile fish, and so on up the food chain to the larger predator fish. The perch or walleyes we now pull up through the ice and enjoy as dinner owe their existence to the algae, and ultimately to the sun.

The lakes go through winter as essentially closed containers. Somehow the ecosystems and all the inter-relationships make it through intact and, come spring and summer, the abundance of life once again becomes apparent. 

We were given these lakes. We did nothing to create them, nothing to deserve them, and yet, year after year, there they are. It behooves us to get to know them better. In the words of eminent conservationist Jane Goodall, “Only if we understand, can we care. Only if we care, will we help. Only if we help, shall all be saved.”

Ted Rulseh resides on Birch Lake in Harshaw and is an advocate for lake protection and improvement. His Lakeland Times and Northwoods River News columns are the basis for a book, “A Lakeside Companion,” published by The University of Wisconsin Press. Ted may be reached at [email protected].