Do corpses float?

33

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Dave and I travel to Wisconsin in September. Autumn is an especially colorful time to visit the midwest and we’d wanted to make the trip for years. During my six weeks on Planet Sofa (and pre-DNA revelation), my bare feet itched to touch familiar ground, and the ground I needed was rich, loamy soil fed by cycles of corn and wheat, thunder and snow. I’d close my eyes and travel to her fields, the thick smell of bovine nectar descending me down, down, down into solid, unfailing earth. I killed time looking for VRBO’s and after finding a tiny red cottage on Fire Lane 13, just a shoreline-mile from my childhood home, I booked a trip.

We arrive in Milwaukee on September 23rd and drive north on Hwy 43 (right past the coordinates of dad’s last earthly breath) to Two Rivers. I want Dave to see Lake Michigan before we head inland and Two Rivers is on the lake’s western border. Our first rental is modest and tidy and an unexpected Monarch butterfly migration jazzes up its propriety. The first morning I step outside the door to a conifer-shaped kaleidoscope of black and orange. So while Dave sits at the kitchen table wrapping up a brand deck, I spend an absurd amount of time shaking the tree’s branches and then standing inside the winged blaze. Butterflies make metamorphosis look fun and I’m grateful for their reassurance.

That night, I slide open the long, east-facing windows of our bedroom—placed just high enough up the wall to obscure the highway so while horizontal, all I see is Lake Michigan. Good enough for me. I listen to crickets until the lake’s long, rhythmic licks lull me to sleep. Unguarded, the midwest pour herself into me.

At 2 AM, I roll over, floating upwards into brain waves just shallow enough to detect a subtle flash of light in the room. I open my eyes and look out over Lake Michigan. Everything is silent. No crack of thunder, no more crickets — just a quiet, undulating wave of heat lightning straddling the horizon. I adjust my pillow and watch the show.

Without the slightest foresight, I had booked this rental on the anniversary of Charles Brauer’s disappearance. September 23, 1985, my biological father hopped aboard his beloved sailboat Fogbow in Frankfurt, Michigan. He was headed across the lake on a routine commute to Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. An expert sailor—and fully aware of the lake’s late summer temperament—he had navigated this route successfully hundreds of times. He even wrote an article for Sailing Magazine, published one month prior to his disappearance, warning fellow sailors about the dangers of late summer sailing on Lake Michigan. But he concludes in the article, “If you want things like home, then stay home.” So true to his adventurous nature, he set sail into the lake’s unpredictable season.

That night a historic storm came up over the lake and washed Fogbow thirty-five feet ashore, just north of Sturgeon Bay.

Charles was never found.

Charlie and his beloved Fog Bow

I do the math. Twenty-nine years ago—to the day!—I could’ve looked out these very windows (just down shore from Sturgeon Bay) to see Fogbow and the giant swells overtaking its deck. With a strong pair of binoculars, maybe I could’ve even seen Charlie’s struggle.

(His brother Rich later confirmed my calculations. Also an expert sailor, and with as much nautical precision as possible, he concluded that around 2am Charlie was likely only a few hundred feet from Wisconsin’s shoreline when he and Fogbow parted ways—the same time I woke up to the lightning show.)

I map out our overlapping, multi-dimensional timelines—the serendipitous timing and location is uncanny—and I begin to feel a strange sense of being guided along in a story that has already been written. My inner rainbow-studded-unicorn has always wanted to experience magic and now the universe is dumping bags full of glitter on my head.

The next morning I say hi to my new winged friends before crossing the highway to a narrow beach. A few hitchhikers flutter around my head as I descend off the bank onto rocky sand. I throw off my shoes and kneel; I splash my face with cold lake water and picture Charlie’s DNA joining mine—a double-helix hug from my paternal line. I try to feel new roots stretching from my recently healed pelvis into his fluid tomb. Are fragments of his bones under my bare toes? What were his last moments, his last thoughts?

Or were they his last? His boat was found but never his body. How is that possible? It’s a giant lake but don’t bodies float after drowning? Later that morning, while Dave navigates us to the tip of Wisconsin’s thumb, I dig into an uplifting google search “Do corpses float?” Turns out, yes. If the earth ever floods, we will eventually return to the light of day, blue, bloated and gassy. Initially, bodies sink but as they decompose and bacteria inflates us like a balloon, we rise like the living dead. So if this is true, Charlie would’ve been found, right? It’s not the ocean after all. But I’m not convinced so I return to Professor Google. “Do Lake Michigan corpses float?”

Lake Michigan is an exception to the rule. Considered the deadliest of the Great Lakes, this body of water is home to more shipping disasters — those involving large loss of life — than all the other Great Lakes combined. The lake’s distinctive longitudinal shape, running 307 miles from north to south, with almost unbroken shores on either side, make it vulnerable to sudden shifts in weather patterns. Sailors can find themselves setting sail in the morning on a clear, blue sky day and meeting eighteen-foot swells that evening. And it’s deep. Too cold and deep for natural decomposition. Sometimes referred to as an icy graveyard, Lake Michigan’s bottom is littered with mummified bodies, resting-in-peace for hundreds of years.

I put my phone down and close my eyes. I understand why humans build burial sites. Grief is a vacuum and we resist its gravitation pull with heavy, conclusive tombstones. Or flowering plums. Our void needs a place to go. I’ve found comfort over the years swimming in Winnebago and imagining dad’s ashes swirling around me like stardust. Or when I’m not there, dancing with sturgeon. But the image of my other father, shipwrecked and mummified at the bottom of a cold, desolate landscape—this one is hard for me. And grieving someone I never knew feels wrong, indulgent, senseless. There’s no where to put this black hole. I fall into its singularity, befuddled as I reach grief’s limit, transforming itself and anything it consumes into a cloud of infinitude.

Burial at Sea

A young boy
beachsand dried to ankles
finds a dead gull washed ashore
and
holding quiet weight
and
feeling stiff satin plumage
resolves
Burial at Sea
   So
while oars in old locks
creak probable gull-tones
the mourned
   carefully placed on the back seat
glides
just above calm blue waters
   only now
   wings tucked
   eyes closed
   feet bound to a round rock
Well off shore
the young boy 
halts the boat to
listen
to
hear
   water gurgle beneath wooden strakes
   Come, come home
   Come, come home
Clenched innocent hands
relax around splintery oars
to move 
lightly 
the weighted bird
         over the edge
        to hold
        a long moment upon the surface
        eternity
          this matter of natural balanced fact
            then
              Releases
              and wide-eye watches
            the World
          too, too rapidly
        sink
        almost from view
        to where
          in blue-green ripple
            and sun-streak distortion
               Sudden great wings unfold
                 reach out
                   to fly
                     a new
                       soft
                      spiral
                    wonderfully
                  silent
                away

(Charles Brauer)

NEXT CHAPTER

Lake Michigan looking innocent, 29 years and ~200 feet from Charles Brauer’s exit.