It’s one of the last warm days before September yields to its first frost. The air is eighty degrees but the water is less than seventy. Most of the people on the north shore beach have braved wading in to their knees or chests; many are on paddle boards or in rafts. A radio on someone’s blanket plays Queen and Led Zeppelin songs and a man throws a frisbee for his dog.

I step into the water and walk, determined to acclimate and reach the point where the shivering stops and the water feels warmer than the air, determined to relive my July swim and the childlike wonder of floating while staring at Willoughby Gap, the cliffs, the summer cottages. I have to concentrate. My body wants me to return to safety and warmth, back in our camping chairs on the shore. Every second, I choose the cold, and keep walking.

When the water is waist-high, I turn and look around me. First the fjord, then the man who found a tennis ball for the dog, then our chairs hidden among the countless other chairs and blankets, then the splashing children at the far end of the beach.

Then the hillside east of the lake, rising sharply. It holds a cemetery. I’m not wearing glasses so I can’t be sure, but there are at least a hundred graves, some with new, shiny granite headstones, others old and worn, or plain white and spaced like piano keys.

The graves seem to be looking down at the beach scene, watching, remembering when they were the ones swimming a single generation ago, or maybe two, or five, in glacial waters left here in the Pleistocene.

I stare up at them for some time, then imagine them watching me as I pinch my nose and plunge under the water, submerged and shocked by the cold. I surface and breathe and let my heart pump blood and begin to warm me. I owe courage to that hillside, because my heart is beating and I don’t have much time. Already, I feel warmer. The sounds of playing children and the bustle of the beach drown out my sudden laugh of delight.