Crossing Scargo Lake

by Agnes Krup | bio

Every morning during our summer vacation, I would swim across Scargo Lake, a deep, glacial outcrop on Cape Cod. The water never appeared the same. On still mornings, small insects hovered over the dark surface; on windy days, choppy little waves hit my face.

A majestic white swan controlling the lake once chased a Canadian goose in circles, the latter protesting with frantic whoops. On another day, heavy raindrops fell all around me, causing smaller drops to splash up on impact from the lake’s mirror-like stillness, like tiny fountains.

This was my half hour of solitude each morning. I’d get in by a small boat ramp, a couple of hundred steps from our cottage, and swim east, toward the steep slope of Scargo Hill, Cape Cod’s highest natural elevation. Just like the slopes, the shores all around the lake are covered in dense foliage, rimming the water with a lush green border.

To swim across and back took just under 30 minutes, and after almost two weeks of this exercise I felt noticeably stronger. My thoughts and ideas floated more freely. I felt confident about my future and that of my child, about what I will be able to accomplish and make possible for her and for myself in the next three, five, 10 years.

One evening, I took my daughter up Scargo Tower, a 100-year old structure built of fieldstones that sits atop Scargo Hill. It isn’t much to look at, not even 30 feet high, but its interior spiral staircase reaches just above the tree tops, and the view is breathtaking.

Less than half a mile to the north there’s the vast extent of Cape Cod Bay and, as the sun was setting, we could just make out Pilgrim’s Monument in Provincetown to the east. But my daughter, focused on things closer at hand, instead pointed to the lake at our feet and remarked how its shape resembles that of a fish.

I told her that I had been on top of this tower once before, almost 30 years ago, when I was 15, on what must have been my first proper date ever, when I was a high school exchange student visiting from Germany. She was unimpressed; the notion of her mother having had a life before being a mother is as unfathomable to her as to any third-grader.

But she was fascinated by the legend of Scargo Lake, as I tried to retell it to her the same way a beautiful boy had told it to me in that same spot three decades earlier:

How the mother of the Princess Scargo died while giving birth to her and how Scargo’s father, the Nobscusset chieftain Sagam, in his grief, vowed to do everything in his power to shield his daughter from ever experiencing the agony and pain felt at the death of a beloved.

How later a young brave fell in love with Scargo, and, before departing on a summer-long hunting trip, presented her with a gift of a fishbowl, a hollowed-out pumpkin with five small fish in it, as a token of his love, and promised to return during the season when the trees would stand in flames.

How the fish outgrew the pumpkin shell and almost died, and how Scargo ran to her father for help, desperate to save them and fearing for the life of her betrothed.

Sagam had the strongest warrior of the tribe shoot an arrow from East to West and another one from North to South to mark the boundaries of the planned fish pond. Then, all the tribe’s women dug out the basin, using clam shells from the nearby ocean beach and heaping the sand from the excavation on what would become the hills of the eastern shore.

They finished their work just in time for the rains to set in, and as soon as the pond was filled with fresh water, Scargo released her languishing fish from the pumpkin shell. When her young man returned, as he had promised, during the season of the flaming trees, they settled on the lake in which, to this day, the offspring of Scargo’s fish swim happily ever after.

My daughter loved the story. We stood in the golden light and watched the sun disappear.

The first time I stood on this tower, the light was also golden, but it had been a different shade of gold: a crisp, beautiful October morning — in the season, indeed, when the trees stood in flame.

Other than the excursion up Scargo Tower, the date included brunch in what must have been a very cute restaurant. At the time it seemed almost grand to me, with its smell of waxed old pine furniture and small dining room windows covered with lace curtains. It must have been a lavish treat on a high school student’s budget.

I have never forgotten the loving thoughtfulness with which this date was planned. Many dates since have been measured against the stakes set that October morning, and most have been found wanting. And even though I must have known at the time that there would be other boys and men, I still felt that I belonged. This was the place where my heart was happy, and I promised myself to return.

The last time I heard from the boy who took me up Scargo Tower, he was living by a different ocean with his own family. But I came back to the ocean I have always wanted to be on, swimming an arrow’s length across and another one back across the pond I fell in love with decades ago.

One morning I turned on my back to float and look at the wide sky above, and for a moment I stopped thinking about where or what I want to be three, five, 10 years down the road. I remembered where I wanted my life to be 30 years ago, and I was right there, in the middle of the lake, the exact spot I had been dreaming of.

I lay completely still for a moment, right between my past and my future. There was nothing else to want, nothing to ask for, at least not that day.

Agnes Krup is a literary agent who lives in Brooklyn Heights. Her previous essays can be read here.