Our Great Lakes

They're close. They're cool. They're Virginia and Maryland's . . .

Here's the problem with the ocean: It wants to kill you.

The sea is a bouillabaisse of death. It is swimming -- literally -- with toothed, barbed and tentacled meanies. There is a seashell so toxic that merely touching it can freeze an adult's heart (at least, according to an episode of "Hawaii Five-O" there is). There are red tides, rip tides, killer whales and hurricanes. Five days in an open boat and you're beef jerky in sunglasses. What's the deadliest occupation in the United States? Crab fishing.

As beach season begins, it's worth remembering this: One little shudder of the sea, like a horse shivering its hide, and a rogue wave can snap your back on the coral and sweep your rag-doll remains under a rock where they become a buffet for bottom dwellers.

And then there are lakes.

Lakes are peaceful. Lakes are cool. Lakes are friendly. In SAT speak, lake is to ocean as stick of incense is to drunken University of Texas homecoming bonfire. A lake is hardly ever trying to kill you.

This summer, swim in a lake.

In this issue, we honor the lakes of Maryland and Virginia -- the neighborhood lakes that are close enough for us to visit during the upcoming swelters of June, July and August, and thus re-connect with all that lakes represent: health, ease, the better days of childhood. All this, without even having to cross the Bay Bridge.

For a lake is more than "a sizable body of fresh water surrounded by land." It is a sizable body of fresh water surrounded by rope swings . . . and rustic cottages, plumes of burger-scented charcoal smoke, breathless kids and frisky, stick-chasing dogs. A lake is an American icon, a tableau of summer innocence scented with bug spray and mustard, a Saturday Evening Post scene of Saturday Morning Fun.

Norman Rockwell loved lakes. So did Aaron Copland. So did Thoreau. So did Opie and his Pa, who started every episode of "The Andy Griffith Show" with a whistling, rock-skipping, achingly honest walk down to Myers Lake. (Thereby confirming -- in daily syndication -- this teaching from the I Ching: "Wind over lake: the image of inner truth." TV Guide never summarized Mayberry so neatly.)

Of course, we don't mean to seize upon the lake as the high-water mark of American culture at the expense of our obvious seafaring heritage. The old salts of New Bedford have earned their tiles on the national mosaic, and we were a whaling, sailing, big-water people, to be sure. But so was every other seaside colonial power with a fleet of ships and a taste for nutmeg, and there are ancient coastal cultures -- Britain, Norway and Japan come to mind -- with much deeper ties to the deep than ours.

Lakes, on the other hand, are quintessentially American. (I know, I know -- the Brits have the Lake District, Bolivia has Lake Titicaca, Switzerland Lake Geneva, etc. But those lakes are really cold, and notoriously lacking in decent hot dogs). Our continental-sized country has an interior so full of, well, interior that lakes are everywhere. The maps of our geography -- and our psyches -- are spotted with friendly little blue aquatic shapes.

The center of my own terra cognita as a boy was the 70-acre lake on my grandfather's farm in Georgia. My cousins and I did our first fishin', canoein', skinny dippin' and cigarette smokin' right there on the muddy bank beneath the railroad trestle. When those big freights rumbled by, the engineer would look down on a dozen kids and dogs churning up the water and scattering the long reflections of pine trees. If we waved hard enough he would blow the whistle. Usually we would just moon him.