My students can’t begin to grasp just how big the Great Lakes are back home. Korea just doesn’t have any lakes so large (and very few natural lakes at all.). The idea of a fresh water body that has a far shore over the horizon is outside of their experience. But it’s what I grew up with.
And growing up with a distant horizon filled with blue water has had an odd impact on me. Even though we lived on the escarpment and only saw the water when going downtown or playing along the escarpment edge, it was still always there. Just over there. I could see it if I wanted.
When I moved to Toronto, I ended up with a great apartment two blocks from the lakeshore. Any time I wanted, I could go rollerblading along the Martin Goodman Trail that connects Etobicoke with Harbourfront. Every day, going to work or out to play, I had water on my horizon.
To get a sense of just how big the Great Lakes are, South Korea is 98,190 square kilometres. The total area of the Great Lakes is 244,000 square kilometres, with Lake Superior being the largest at 82,100 square kilometers. But I grew up by the smallest of the Great Lakes, Ontario, which is only 18,960 square kilometers. Only. That’s still rather huge.
Years and years ago I drove from Guelph to Calgary, covering a good chunk of Canada in the process. The first half of the trip was along the northern shore of Lakes Huron and Superior. The second half of the trip was crossing the prairie. The contrast between these two expanses is amazing.
Where the lakes were blue and reassuring, almost inviting, the prairie was, to me, empty yellow fields that went on for days. Seeing Winnipeg, a city in the middle of nowhere, bothered me. That many people, and where was the water? I know the Red River runs through the area, but still, it wasn’t visible – the terrain was just flat expanse after flat expanse of nothingness with a city plopped in the middle.
That was the first time I became aware of just how my perceptions of wellbeing are tied to the presence of water.
I know that for as long as I can remember, I’ve always put my hands in the water. I think that was something that my dad started me doing – you go to new water and you put your hands into it, feel it. I always do that whenever I go to Georgian Bay, as kind of a hello, and I’ve often done it when I’ve gone to the shore of new water, including the Mediterranean when I was staying in Barcelona.
Living in Bundang for over two years was an experience unequalled in my life. I thoroughly enjoyed it. But the town is nestled in a valley between low mountains. Dawn is late and sunset is early. Some days, not often but occasionally, I just felt the need to see water or at least a long horizon. Wolmido, a suburb of Incheon, was the closest place that I could go to, to see big skies kissing the water of the Yellow Sea. Wolmido was not easily accessible – a bus from Bundang to Yeoido would get me through the first leg in about an hour, then the train would take another 90 minutes to go the rest of the way to Incheon. Another short bus ride and walk and I'd finally be at the Wolmido boardwalk.
But I never got to put my hands into the Yellow Sea.
Now I live in Busan, and my apartment looks over the Sea of Japan (the East Sea, as the Koreans call it). Each morning I can walk down to the beach and watch the waves break on the shore. When I want to be among trees, I can climb the rocky shore of Dongbaek point and sit on rocks just like those in Georgian Bay, among windswept pine trees just like those in Georgian Bay, and I can read a book or watch the waves.
The Little River Band did a song way back in my youth called “Cool Change.” Until recently I have always mis-heard the lyrics as saying “I was born at the side of water and it’s there that I feel my best.” But the song actually says “I was born in the sign of water and it’s there that I feel my best.“ Well, I’m an Aquarius, a water bearer and just missed being born a Pisces, a fish and at the side of water is where I feel my best.
Who knows what I’ll do when I go to the plains of Africa. Maybe I’ll paint the grasslands blue.
