01.23.08
Under the Lake
They stood facing each other through the cold, skim milk of the lake bottom.
Armen covered Kurt, the receiver on the right side. Chuck called out the snap count.
As soon as Chuck took the snap, Mehrzad started barking out the rush count and Kurt took off with all his ample speed. Armen turned and did his futile best to keep Kurt close. When he heard the rush count complete, Armen turned to check the action at the line of scrimmage, and immediately realized that he couldn’t see anyone at all. They were all shrouded in the milk.
Suddenly, Chuck materialized through the mirk, cutting across the field from the right. Before Armen could figure out what was going on, Chuck split the field between Armen and the left cornerback, while Kurt and the left receiver turned back to block, and it was over.
As Armen reined back the fruitless pursuit, Mehrzad jogged casually up from behind to greet him. “Welcome to lake football, Arm.”
Armen was new in town. Mehrzad spent much of his winters under Tulare Lake, for during much of the winter that seasonal lake filled the basin wherein he spent his childhood. Tulare Lake is a special kind of lake. Though living in the lake can be quite uncomfortably cold and damp, life usually goes on quite regularly, excepting a few school closures and freeway pile-ups.
During and following a winter rain, the water collects on the level basin floor. Puddles are everywhere. It doesn’t take much water to result in a puddle with a great deal of surface area. Once the storm clears and the sky opens, the earth’s warmth escapes heavenward. In the thinner air of the nearby mountains, the heat escapes even more quickly. As the heat escapes, the dense, cold, mountain air begins to slip down slope. So much of this cold air slides onto the wet basin bottom that a visible lake of cold air forms—visible because the moisture on the basin bottom saturates the cold air, forming a dense cloud with a ceiling as level as the surface of a lake, with no more subsurface visibility than a lake, and sometimes even less.
The school closure days were football days. Once the closure announcement scrolled across the TV screen, Mehrzad would rush off to the nearest schoolyard to meet the boys.
© 2008 Dan J. Jensen
