> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://essays.bluegreentheology.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Nothing But Mystery Below It - URL: https://essays.bluegreentheology.org/nothing-but-mystery-below-it/ - Published: 2026-08-16T18:20:49.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-16T18:20:48.000Z - Description: Filamentous strands are thickening near the spillway, and the round dot colonies, nitella, are spreading across the shallows... - Author: Gideon L. K. Pollach The algae is worse this week. Filamentous strands are thickening near the spillway, and the round dot colonies, nitella, are spreading across the shallows where the water sits still enough to let them. This is the pond at its most visibly unwell. You can stand at the edge and watch it happening, which is its own kind of mercy, even an unwelcome one. At least you can see it. The house is different than it was two weeks ago. Byrd has been sleeping in Wood's bed. Peyton, fifteen, has floated the idea of driving his car, a plan complicated by the fact that she does not have a license, a detail she considers a technicality. Wood himself is unreachable. He is somewhere in the Adirondacks with a canoe and no signal, and after that he goes to Cayuga. To Ithaca. Like Odysseus. I have been reading about that lake this week, trying to learn the watershed my son is about to belong to, the way I have spent years learning this one. But like Cayuga itself, it turns out to be too much history to hold. It's just too deep. St. John's Pond is fourteen acres. I can walk the whole shoreline. I know its depth, its weir, its algae by name. I know its history. Cayuga runs thirty-eight miles and drops past four hundred feet in places, into water that never warms. Most of what lives in that lake will never reach its depths, and neither will any of us who walks along its shore. I can try to earn the lake's history. I won't exhaust it. I have been doing that all week, and I am glad for it. But there is a floor down there I will never see, in a watershed I do not know, that flows in an opposing direction, holding a depth I have no way to manage or even properly imagine. We drove up and stood at the edge of it. It is bigger than imagination. All the reading in the world had not prepared me for that. You can hold a number like 400 feet or 38 miles in your head and still be wrong about what it means until you are standing on the shore and the far end of the lake has disappeared into haze, and the water in front of you does not look like something with a bottom at all. That is different from the algae. The algae I can hate, at least. I can stand at the spillway and wish it away and mean it, the way I have spent eighteen years wishing away whatever threatened my children, tending what needed tending. Cayuga asks nothing of me. It does not need me to tend it, or to steward it. It rests on its own, with resources to spare. That is all I could ever wish for my children, and yours. Your watershed and mine. Mystery. Depth. Resources to spare. Self-reliance. I know Cayuga is not struggling at all, as far as anyone can tell. It is simply deep, and cold, and largely unvisited, holding whatever it holds, four hundred feet of water older and stranger than anything we could have built or managed. Our children are walking into a mystery we did not make and cannot follow them into. Somehow that is not only frightening. It is also, against all expectations, beautiful. **A Prayer** God of the shallow water I can walk the edge of, and the deep water I cannot: teach me to meet what I do not understand with wonder before I meet it with worry. Hold what I have released to you, the way that lake holds what none of us can follow down to. I do not know what is at the bottom of this. Let me be amazed by that, and not only afraid of it. *Amen*.