Lake Massawippi
Lake Massawippi sits in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, sixty kilometres east of Sherbrooke and a hundred kilometres north of the Vermont border. The lake is fourteen kilometres long, narrow, with the shape of a long index finger pointing roughly north-northwest to south-southeast. It is a glacial lake — deep, cold, the floor of it scoured out by the last ice sheet about twelve thousand years ago. The hills around the lake are hardwood forest, sugar maple and birch and beech, mixed with conifer on the higher ridges.
I write from the dock of a small cabin on the eastern shore at five-fifty in the morning in the last week of June. The dock is wood, weather-greyed, with two cleats that have been replaced more recently than the rest. The water is glass-still. A thin mist hangs about a foot above the surface, in a layer maybe ten metres across, that drifts slowly southward as the morning warms. The mist is not the dramatic mist of a postcard; it is a low, even, almost-not-there mist, the kind a person looking briefly might miss.
The light at this hour is the long pre-dawn northern light. The sun will rise at six-eleven this morning. The sky to the east, above the ridge of hardwood, is a pale band of greenish yellow with a higher band of pearl grey above it. The lake, which had been black at five-thirty, is now beginning to take on the pearl grey from the upper sky.
A loon calls from the southern end of the lake. The call of the common loon — Gavia immer, the lake's largest year-round resident — is a four-note phrase, the second and fourth notes higher than the first and third. The call carries about three kilometres on still water. There is a long silence after the first call. Then a second loon, perhaps a mile away, answers with the same phrase, and the first loon answers again. The two loons exchange the phrase six or seven times. Then both stop.
The water temperature this morning is around eighteen degrees Celsius. Even in the last week of June, the lake has not fully warmed from the spring melt. A swim now would shock the body. By August the upper layer will be twenty-three or twenty-four degrees and a long swim becomes possible. The lower layer of the lake, below the thermocline at about eight metres down, stays around four degrees year-round; the lake remembers the ice that made it.
The dawn fully arrives at six-eleven. The light goes from pearl to gold within minutes. The mist on the surface dissolves in the first warmth of direct sun. A breeze begins to move across the lake from the northwest. The morning becomes ordinary, the lake becomes legible to any visitor as a lake, and the small forty-minute window in which it had been something otherwise has closed.
The cabin's coffee is starting somewhere behind me.
— ACY · Edition I, July 2026