“This could be one of the last good days of summer.”

My husband and I start saying this in early August. Never mind that in Milwaukee, where we live, summer often stretches all the way through September. The sentence is code for: “Drop everything, let’s get out on the lake.” Another code phrase is, “Flat as a pancake.” While surfers might skip work to seize big waves, when it comes to Lake Michigan, we wait for the big calm.

See, we have a boat.

Whenever I say this, I feel a flush of embarrassment and a need to justify the possession. I shouldn’t. After all, this is Wisconsin, a state sandwiched between the mighty Mississippi and the fifth largest lake in the world, with thousands of inland lakes scattered between them. Here, every third garage contains a pleasure craft of some kind.

But in my circle of friends—who are mostly broke, or writers, or professors, or all three—owning a gas-guzzling speedboat feels like a ridiculous extravagance. Writers are supposed to look inward, right? To recognize the folly of material possessions and favor serious, intellectual pursuits? They’re supposed to wear glasses, not sunglasses.

It’s hard to imagine Virginia Woolf in a swimsuit on the deck of a boat, sipping a margarita from a Solo cup.

And yet, you know what? Here she is, on a beach at least, in the sun, laughing, dusting sand off her hands:

Hemingway had his fishing, Nabokov his butterfly hunts, O’Connor her assorted peacocks and fowl. And let’s not forget Mark Twain, who took his own pen name from a boating term. After all, no one can write every waking moment; most can’t even manage 40 hours a week. So we have to find something besides angst and despair to fill those hours between writing sessions that can feel so empty and wonderless. We need to find sources of wonder here in the real world.

Still, I feel a little guilty when I abandon the file that contains my next book and grab a towel and head for the marina. I mean, this book isn’t going to just write itself. And life is short; I should seize every minute I have to finish this thing before it goes stale in my head.

But those thoughts only last for the first four blocks, until I round the top of the hill near my house and catch sight of Lake Michigan stretching its belly out to the horizon. Some days, it’s Mediterranean blue, other days dark and gouged with whitecaps. Every once in a while it’s flat as a mill pond and draped in a haze that obliterates the line between the water and the horizon.

Something this big requires no justification. It imposes its will, it pulls you in. And in its presence, me and my words, my grand ideas all seem so small and inconsequential, so cut off from the world.

Our boat isn’t big but it’s fast. Within minutes we can be miles from shore and any other boat: isolated, but still connected. Just not to the usual things. On the water, I’m cut off from the wires and screens I rely on, cut off from the phone and the endless to-do lists that dog me at home and at work.

In a lake that’s 22,000 square miles, I am only a tiny dot, and not a single fish or boater would care if I never wrote another word. The pressure is off. The pressure never existed at all. I could be capsized and sunk, swallowed into oblivion, in no time.

This is only intermittently frightening. Mostly, the knowledge exhilarates, liberates me. It comes closer than anything else I’ve known to the feeling of disappearing deep inside a paragraph that’s writing itself.

I used to say, “Well, I can write on the boat. Or at least do my reading.” But I don’t. All I do, really, is gaze out across the water. Because the hours on the lake empty out my head. They reduce me almost to an infant state, rocking in the waves that slosh against the hollow drum of the hull, thinking about nothing but the big sky and my own breaths in and out.

Some of us need a little high-horsepowered help to access a meditative state.

What matters is that we get there. What matters is that we forge a path out of our obsessively tinkering minds, away from our fantasies and our fears, and back to the big bad world at large, the world of wind and water and soil, the world that supports us, in the end.

When the ride is over and I’m back on land, my lungs shimmer with all the fresh air and my heart beats both louder and slower. My skin is flushed and my hair a tangled mess, but my brain is clear and ready for take-off, once I get back there to my desk with my other pleasure craft.

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