Becoming Water
paternoster (noun) 1. (in the Roman Catholic Church) the Lord's Prayer, especially in Latin
Paternoster lakes occur in a series down a formerly glaciated valley in small basins scooped out by the glacier as it retreated. The name suggests a similarity to beads on a rosary, and the lakes are often connected to one another by streams that run between them and down the valley.
—National Park Service
Grinnell Valley, Photo by the National Park Service
In 2018 I was offered the position of July Artist-in-Residence at Glacier National Park, an area encompassing over 1 million acres of pristine wilderness in northwestern Montana. I was provided four weeks use of a historic cabin on the north shore of Lake McDonald. As Artist-in-Residence, my job was to creatively explore and engage the natural and cultural resources of the park while pursuing my artistic goals.
On the east side of Glacier National Park, in an area known as Many Glacier, a dazzling series of paternoster lakes lies nestled inside the length of Grinnell Valley. Swiftcurrent Lake, Lake Josephine, Grinnell Lake, and Upper Grinnell Lake are stacked along the 5.5 mile stretch between Many Glacier Hotel and the foot of Grinnell Glacier, which is situated just below the sheer rock spine of the Continental Divide. The glacier feeds directly into Upper Grinnell Lake, an iceberg-filled cirque at the head of the valley. From here, Grinnell Creek plummets 960 feet to the blue-green pool of Grinnell Lake below. At the outflow of Grinnell Lake, Cataract Creek winds for just over a mile through dense alpine forest before entering the mile-long Lake Josephine. Josephine then connects to the slightly smaller Swiftcurrent Lake via another three-quarter mile of stream bed.
At the time of my residency, I was working on a series of large-scale painted prayers, The Lilies How They Grow. These nine, 7 x 5 foot pieces were an appeal for safe passage through the dark aftermath that followed the sudden deaths of my twin brother and mother. On July 26th, 2018, as an enactment of this continual prayer, I swam the chain of paternoster lakes and waterways that make up the Grinnell Glacier Complex. I prayed my way from the life-sustaining headwaters of the North American continent to the bottom of the valley, moving along the course one lake, one stroke, one moment of simply being carried at a time. I needed to be inside the beads and the thread lacing them together. I needed to become the water—to open up a space for my prayers and the prayers of others by becoming the rosary in the landscape itself.
All of my gratitude to my two beloved sisters, Jaimey Hamilton-Faris and Elizabeth Elliott, for choosing to be present on this day, and for imagining and realizing this prayer with me.
Upper Grinnell Lake, Glacier National Park
I stand beneath the headwall of the valley. The configuration of phenomena held by the cirque resembles less a lake than an otherworldly orchestration of raw elements—an amalgam of rock, ice, water and fog.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
Tongues and slabs of dense white are buoyed by swaths of milky blue-green.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
Walls of Precambrian strata rise abruptly and imperiously upward towards their mist-enshrouded spine.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
A silent chute of water cascades down from an invisible source in the sky.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I am enveloped in a stillness thick and ageless, a quiet yawning and complete.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
The materiality of this place is ancient and substantial, yet the conditions are momentary and precarious.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
Rock is becoming gravel is becoming sand is becoming silt is becoming clay.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
Ice is becoming slush is becoming water is becoming fog is becoming rain.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
Everything eats and swallows and merges with everything else in a glorious glacial soup.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
In the crudeness of these surroundings I am starkly aware of the body and its functions—pulsations at the tiny drums of the temples and wrists, inflations and deflations of the chest cavity, soft fleshy swallows, a film of perspiration on the skin.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I pull the wetsuit, booties, and mitts from the belly of my pack.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I take off my boots and strip out of my clothes, wriggling into the thick sheathe of neoprene that will function as insulating blubber.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
Covered in this cushiony black carapace, the body becomes androgynous, anonymous.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I don the booties and mitts, transforming feet and hands into fins and paws.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I am now utterly and eagerly amphibious.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
Upper Grinnell Lake, Glacier National Park, Photo by Jaimey Hamilton-Faris
I scramble down the sloping moraine to the edge of the tarn, where a rock platform the color of yellow oxide juts out into the chalky water.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I trace the line I will make with my body in my mind. I ponder my path through the ice.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
A sublime silence connects the space between me and the brimming bead of liquid I am about to enter, between the beating of my heart and the reverberating mantra in my head.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
Not a single ripple stirs the surface of the lake. There is not the faintest draft of wind.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I touch one rubbery foot to the water.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I take a breath.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I submerge the other foot.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I take a breath.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I immerse myself up to my chest.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I take a breath.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
One more step and I am swimming.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
Upper Grinnell Lake, Glacier National Park, Photo by Elizabeth Elliott
I stroke my way out and across the icy, opaque water into the center of the bead.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I tread in the slush beneath the waterfall that cascades from the invisible place in the sky.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I roll onto my back, pulling my body through the swaths of milky blue-green.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
My pupils constrict against the glare of fog and mist above.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
My peripheral vision is filled by the precipitous walls of rock that hold the water that is holding me.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I swim until the dense tongues and slabs of frozen white permit me to swim no further, and then I slither up onto them and let them buoy the weight of me as the lake water buoys the weight of them.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I walk gently across their backs.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
Upper Grinnell Lake, Glacier National Park, Photo by Jaimey Hamilton-Faris
Upper Grinnell Lake, Glacier National Park, Photo by Elizabeth Elliott
Returning briefly to land, I gather my things and begin the descent to the bottom of Grinnell Falls.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
Here, 960 vertical feel below Upper Grinnell Lake, Grinnell Lake lies gleaming beneath the north face of Angel Wing summit.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I give myself over to the cold turquoise liquid before me.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I swim in and around and across this second lustrous lake-bead.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
If the day’s prayer is recited unbroken, I will not emerge from the water again until I have reached Many Glacier Hotel at the base of the valley, more than three miles away.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
Grinnell Lake, Glacier National Park, Photo by Jaimey Hamilton-Faris
Approaching the outflow of Cataract Creek, I feel my body suddenly lift and accelerate, propelled forward as what is lake starts to become stream.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
The water, moments ago a deep bowl of placidity, is now a shallow surging current.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
It is a ribbon of wilderness rushing over and around its own deposits, pooling along banks and bends, collecting itself in swirling eddies and pouring forth once again in a sinuous and perpetual push towards the large Lake Josephine below.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
In the artery of the waterway I am no longer swimming—I am being carried.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
My body becomes the course of the water, the water itself.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I extend into everything the water touches and holds—the stones, the algae, the mud, the sticks, the fallen trees, the tangled strainers of weather-bleached logs, the grasses, the wildflowers, the delicate legs of the deer that bounds in front of me and then stands, poised in perplexity at the edge of the stream, watching me float by.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
What once appeared as obstacles in my path are suddenly generous supports, proliferations of the dense and flexible tissues of my own anatomy.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
Each moment becomes an opening, a gate, a passage, an event unfolding.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I am all at once touching, inside of, and making the necklace.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
In a seamless conspiring of forms and forces, I am being ferried down the valley by nothing short of grace.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
Cataract Creek, Glacier National Park, Photo by Jaimey Hamilton-Faris
Drifting under the footbridge at the inflow of Lake Josephine, the body of water I now prepare to enter bears little resemblance to the lake that I walked along earlier that morning, ripple-less and hyaline.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
The Lake Josephine of a few hours ago had been a highly burnished bead, cerulean and oblong, holding the sky.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
This new Lake Josephine is raging and riotous, battered by approaching storm gusts and, from this angle, looking east with the sun behind me, a dark green-black.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
“Are you confident you can swim the whole lake?” Jaimey asks, the frothing beast of Josephine before us.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
Looking out over the mile-long stretch of whitecaps, my face dead into a hard wind, I have absolutely no idea how far I will be able to swim.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
“I’ll swim for as long as I can bear the water.”
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
“Swim for as long as the water can bear you.”
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
One stroke, one recitation of the mantra, one lake-bead at a time—I would swim for as long as I could swim, for as long as the lake permitted me to swim, and that would be the prayer.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
Lake Josephine, Glacier National Park, Photo by Jaimey Hamilton-Faris
I swim for several minutes in relentless, violent chop.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
Dark thunderheads loom to the south, their deep reverberations pealing portentously through the air.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I stay close to the shoreline, watching and listening for signals to stop, indications that I should end or modify the momentum of this prayer.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
For another several minutes I cough and choke and flounder in the frigid tempest.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
Then, as abruptly as it began its stirrings, the wind slackens.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
The waves subside.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
The thunderheads lift up and over the Continental Divide, releasing their fury on the far side of the Garden Wall.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I take a stroke.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I breathe.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I take another stroke.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
A mile later I cross over to the southern shoreline, searching for the outflow to Swiftcurrent Lake.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I float effortlessly down the narrow stream.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I drift.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I spin.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I swim the last half-mile down shallow Swiftcurrent Lake, the massive facade of Many Glacier Hotel beckoning from the east.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I pedal through the muddy bottom with my fin-feet and emerge onto the shore.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
Jaimey is waiting on the dock with a cup of hot tea.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
I take a sip.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
The dome of clouds above us fractures into snakes of light. Explosions of thunder shake the valley walls.
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
And the rain falls through sluices in the sky.
Amen.
Swiftcurrent Lake, Glacier National Park, Photo by Jaimey Hamilton-Faris
The swim, in its many dimensions, was a collaboration with landscape, with the elements, with weather, with the flux of a place, with the lines of my two best friends—Lizzy and Jaimey—as we paralleled, braided, diverged, crossed, entangled and disentangled from one another within the prayer we were creating. And isn't this knotting of lines what we call love?
This embodiment of prayer became a passage out of all that had held me back. It became a physical act of letting go, of releasing the weight of the past, of authoring myself out of my own heartbreak. It became a gesture of transforming obstacles, of making room for vitality. It became a softening of the fear of my own potential to exist in perpetual openness and creativity. It became an impulse towards acceptance, trust, and fluid way-finding. It was a thrust towards faith and hope in the possibility of joy. It became, in its pith, a recommitment to life.
Swimming my way through all of that icy milk-water, I could not hear the voices of my brother and mother, as I sometimes hear them now, as I heard them in life. Rather, I heard them as part of a full and sonorous melding of voices, a chorus of vibrations harmonizing into what wasn't a melody but only sound. Through the volume of it all I couldn't even hear my own voice. I could only move, flow, pray my way down the valley one lake, one recitation of the mantra, one step or stroke or moment of being carried at a time. I could hold no thought in my mind other than the prayer, and no feeling in my heart other than the overwhelming power of being exactly where I was, of knowing everything that had brought me to this place and to this moment, and of simply being allowed to be there.
I extend my deepest thanks and appreciation to Glacier National Park and the National Park Service for supporting my residency, an experience that not only changed my life, but brought me home to it.