Slowly.
Things moved slowly and easily there. There was no great importance held on anything really, at least that’s the way it seemed. It was quiet because nothing much ever seemed to happen. But while it was quiet and still, it was filled with little sounds and motions and activities that became familiar and part of what everything was.
In the morning, at first light, there was wind, the wind that pushed the ripples across the surface of the lake, and woke the sleeping adults and children to the gentle sound of the water meeting the wooden docks and aluminum boats that floated near the shore. At the bait shop, there were men quietly exchanging tips and secrets and hunches on where the Bass and Bluegills were biting and bragging with real accounts and tall tales of how many had been taken the day before. Later in the morning, there were sausage links sizzling on the griddle, popping and crisping until they were brown on their outsides. Even later in the morning, there were the sounds of The Price is Right gently spilling out of screen windows and subtly competing with the last sounds of the water before the wind would move off of the lake and into the corn and bean fields, where it stayed until the evening. Pages of books and magazines flipped and turned. In the afternoon there were the sounds of naps and flies. In town, bells on cash registers chimed and drawers shuffled in and out at the grocery store. Back at the lake, hummingbirds fluttered as they sipped nectar from plastic feeders. Far away, a lawn mower growled and trimmed. As the sun was on its way down, the evening news and Jeopardy then drifted out of those screened windows. In the evening, bonfires cracked. Bugs fried on electric zappers. An occasional bullfrog spoke up. On some nights, there were some fireworks in the sky, somewhere across the lake. Then, when the sun was all the way gone, the news was over and the TVs turned off, the fires had died out, and the mosquitoes had even gone to bed, there was almost silence. It was so close.
At any time in the day, though, morning, afternoon or night, layered far below everything else, there were reels casting out, and pulling in. There were bobbers and bait plunking into the water, softly, but with a slight clap, like the sound of skin slapping skin. There were distant voices of stories being told, and men growing old and boys growing up. The fishing never stopped, and it was what brought everything together, in a place set apart from reality and the rest of the world, on a relatively small lake in Indiana.