An elementary school teacher had somehow got it into my head that Lake Erie was being drained by kitchen faucets. I thought the water came straight from there, the only lake in the world known to me at the time, and that my mother's disregard was slowly but surely siphoning it away. In fourth grade, I became an activist. "Save Lake Erie," I posted on a little note by the sink. "Lake Erie! Lake Erie!" I would shout when I spotted an unattended faucet.

Lake Erie was actually a glorified pollution basin, of course. I rarely even saw it, even though we only lived half an hour away. But the times we did spend at the waterfront felt like a vacation. For years my great-aunt Kate had run a bar overlooking the lake. She died before I was born, but my grandparents took us down there to visit the legendary spot. Aunt Kate used to lift men up by their collars and the seats of their pants when they got too rowdy, my grandpa told me. Then she'd throw 'em right out the front door. She used to cook venison from deer she lugged in whole and skinned herself. She let men without a place to stay live in the rooms above the bar, and she could be the best friend you ever had. I come from a generation without celebrity role models, but I always looked up to Aunt Kate. I still figure that she's up in heaven watching my everyday struggles and encouraging me to approach things with a little more punch.

The Falls

Niagara Falls was the other major water attraction in Western New York. Like most parts of that region, its heyday passed in the 1930s when people still came from far and wide just to see it. To my parents, it was a Soviet target. My mother hid under her desk during air-raid drills, told that the Soviets would try to knock out Niagara Falls because of its hydroelectric power. When I was a baby, my mother took me to see it and instantly regretted it. What if I fell in? My memories of Niagara Falls, however, are a little different. It was a spot to go after the prom and wander around frigidly in slinky dresses and high-heeled shoes while the limo waited in the parking lot. On the Canadian side it borders Clifton Hill, a Las Vegas-style strip of flashing lights, loud bars, haunted houses and cheap t-shirts. At 19 I sipped Fuzzy Navels and margaritas in the midst of this cacophony.

The town of Niagara Falls on the American side was something else. I got lost there once, in broad daylight, and no neighborhood has scared me that much since, not even high-rise Chicago housing projects. At 18, it was my first attempt at driving outside my suburb of Clarence alone, and I missed a crucial turn that would take me to the bridge leading to the Canadian side where I was meeting a friend. I ended up lost in a maze of one-way streets, driving past houses with boarded-up windows, liquor stores with rusting signs, falling-apart tourist information stands painted the surreal blue color of swimming-pool covers. I stopped at one and got directions. How lucky to be lost somewhere that considered itself a tourist town.

Shores

I'm drawn to the edge of water. I will look out at a still lake for hours. I will wade to my waist in it, even while wearing my favorite pair of jeans. But don't ask me to swim. My aversion to water was obvious when I refused to bathe as a kid. Showers and baths were too cold, too wet, too much hassle and soap in the eyes. Real problems with water began when my eyesight started failing at age 8. I got glasses, with tortoise-shell rims that matched my brown hair. They made my big brown eyes look smaller, but I didnšt care. Without them the world was uncomfortable, unreal, misunderstood. I truly believed that the devil was in the details. Or God. Or both. Whoever it was, I couldn't see him without my glasses. I remember swimming lessons at the YMCA as feeling completely underwater, even though II never put my face in then. I simply couldn't see straight, and since I couldn't see lips moving I also felt oddly deafened. My teacher's arms moved in a windmill blur. I took lessons, though, because my mother was determined to make a swimmer out of me. No woman in my family has ever learned to swim, from my great-grandmother on down. They have all also been extremely prone to excessive anxiety. I've tried to at least conquer their inherited fear of boats, however. While whale-watching on a family vacation to Boston at age 10, my white-knuckled mother made us stand far from the ship's railing. I snuck away and leaned over the edge anyway for a few minutes, watching the ocean slip by and savoring the adrenaline rush. I tried swimming at the beach during that vacation, but I and my entire family preferred the hotel pool where we could splash around without swallowing salt water.

Great Lakes

The first time I found myself in a Great Lake was the first week of my freshman year at Northwestern University. I'd been determined to try new things, and most importantly to make friends quickly before everyone already had friends and didn't need me around. So when our dorm's orientation chairman suggested a covert trip to the beach at midnight, I went along. With a nervous bunch of eight strangers, I trekked down to the shore barefoot over rough sidewalks and cold sand. Then I hiked the legs of my brand new jeans up to my knees and waded in. Some people had worn bathing suits and were far away before I got even ankle-deep. But the center of the lake pulled me forward like the earth pulls at the moon. I kept wading deeper. Suddenly I realized I was up to my thighs, the sand under my toes sucking in and out with the little tide, like the breath of someone sleeping. As the skyline of Chicago glowed in the distance, the lake became mine.

The first time I ever canoed was on September 11, 2001. When hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, I was sleeping peacefully in a cabin on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. My three friends and I woke up to the disaster scene and stayed locked in our armchairs around a tiny T.V. set for hours. But by that afternoon Tara, Jon, Brendan and I were empty from crying and shock. So we hauled canoes from the garage through the woods to a tiny bay of Lake Superior. For a few hours, Tara and I paddled in silence. All I saw was the edge of the woods and this gleaming surface that extended forever moving stroke by stroke beneath our oars. I concentrated only on turning mine at the most efficient angle, so I could stay out longer without tiring. We watched the sun set in a dramatic blaze of pink and orange on the horizon of the lake until it faded into pastel slivers.

Oceans

It scares me that the entire earth was once covered in water, and could be covered in water again. This sounds more like a nightmare than a geological fact. Oceans usually represent for me that primal bath, barely hemmed in by the continents, full of jellyfish and bottomless depths. But the water off the coast of Denmark seemed much less harmless. During my junior year of college I studied in the city of Copenhagen, which is on an island. I was so accustomed to Northwestern's lakefront campus that I never quite grasped that the Baltic Sea was not some pristine version of Lake Michigan. But the water was so crystal clear it could have come straight from a tap, lapping onto white sand.

At the end of my semester, my mother came to visit. We flew back together with a layover in Iceland for a night, so we rented a red stick-shift Honda. My mother drove it through the countryside while I traced the long, looping roads on our vague map from the car-rental desk. The sight-seeing trip was my idea, and it proves the sacrifices that mothers will make for their children. She hadn't driven a stick shift in 25 years, and hates driving long distances anyway. But we surfed Icelandic radio stations and talked like grown-ups. At one point we came upon a gorge in the middle of nowhere, or nowhere with signs that we could decipher, and parked the car to explore. We found a roaring waterfall that seemed as big as Niagara Falls.

Endings

Some people believe that the world will end in fire or ice. I think it will end in water. Global warming will raise sea levels and there we will be, clamboring for the mountaintops as the salt water soaks up over our ankles. Maybe I'll get on a boat then, and I'll make my mother and grandmother come, too. They will anxiously consent moments before the floods come crashing through their fragile houses, and they climb into my boat with me. Soon there will be nothing but water for miles. There we will be, bobbing along without direction as they beg me to please, don't fall in.