After a record-breaking season of rain, the five-year mega drought in California was over. Atmospheric rivers and bomb cyclones rolled inland, brought steel gray skies, charcoal clouds, and torrents of water. Snow wrapped mountaintops, and for a brief moment, it seemed all would be well. But the relentless sun grew hotter than ever before. The snow melted and the streams, rivers, and waterfalls gushed to the valley below.
            And there emerged a ghost lake, Tulare Lake, once the largest lake west of the Mississippi. Even as the rain poured and the snow melted and the valley filled with water, Chris’s dad’s memory receded, plunged beneath his own opaque waters, the twists and cascades of plaque crusted amyloids and neurofibrillary tangles. Each day, his personality dulled into a blurrier shadow of who he had been.
            Tulare Lake was thirty or so miles from where Chris had grown up and where his parents, Mark and Janice, still lived in the town named after the lake.
            Chris called his parents’ landline—they still had one, the same number for forty years—and was put on speakerphone.
            “Just the routine,” said his mom, Janice. “I did the books at the sign shop Monday and Tuesday. Went to a doctor’s appointment on Wednesday.”
            “Well, that’s all for us,” said his dad. “You take care. Tell everyone we love them.”
            “He just called,” Janice said. “We’re not getting off the phone yet. Do you want to go watch the news?”
            “Me? Why would I get off the phone? He just called. Who called?”
            “Your son.”
            “Of course. My dear, dear son. How are you?”
            Chris sighed. He found having compassion for his father difficult. “We want to come down and check out Tulare Lake on Saturday,” he told his mom.
            “Oh! Really? That would be great,” Janice said. “My friend Nadine drove out and said it’s so big there are waves.”

Chris and his wife Clare arrived at his parent’s house in the early afternoon. Janice had prepared lunch and brought out an old atlas from the eighties. On a finger-worn page in the atlas, Chris found Corcoran. And, sure enough, next to Corcoran, was a small blue box labeled Tulare Lake.
            Chris and Clare climbed into the back seat of Mark’s and Janice’s mini-SUV. Chris’s mom had only recently begun to drive with his dad in the passenger seat after his license had been revoked.
            Chris and Clare exchanged a glance in the back seat as Chris’s mom gunned the motor past the dilapidated houses and junk-filled yards at the edge of town. She seemed to have found her driving chops, and she tore around the roads out in the country like a race car driver. Chris and Clare gripped the edges of the back seat. Chris looked at the map on his phone.
            “Go straight,” Chris said. “After the next intersection, I think we should turn right.”
            “That won’t put us on the south side of Highway 49, though,” said Clare.
            “No, it will. See? Straight through and then left.” Chris held up his phone. Clare shrugged and shook her head.
            They passed fields of dirt and dried weeds, fields planted with tomato seedlings, cotton, and young almond orchards. Heave-sided barns looked like they might collapse at any minute.
            “It should be around here,” Chris said.
            “No,” Clare said. “I told you we need to be on the other side of that highway.”           
            “Where are we going?” Mark asked for what seemed like the hundredth time. Each time, he became increasingly exasperated.
            “Tulare Lake,” Janice said.
            “Tulare Lake? There’s no lake out here.”
            “Yes, there is,” Janice said. “From all the storms.”
            “We just have to find it,” Chris said. “That’s why we’re driving around.”
            “Why do we need to see a lake?”
            “Because it’s historic,” Chris said. “And huge! Eighteen miles across.”
            “A huge lake?”
            “The size of Lake Tahoe,” Clare said.
            “We’re going to Lake Tahoe?”
            “No,” Janice said. “We’re going to Tulare Lake. Out here.”
            “There’s no lake out here.”
            “Yes, there is,” Janice said. “From all the rain.”
            “What we need to do is go home,” Mark said. “We need to go HOME. HOME.”
            His outburst made Chris feel anxious. Clare’s hands were clasped tightly on her lap.
            “Maybe we should just go back,” Chris said.
            Janice, surprisingly, said, “No, we’re going to see the lake. I want to see the lake.” She turned to Mark and swerved. “I told you you could stay home. You wanted to come.”
            “I didn’t want to come,”
            “Yes, you did,” Janice said.
            “Well, now I want to go home.”
            “Ignore him,” Janice said.
            Her standing up to him surprised Chris. Chris’s dad had always ruled their house with silence and an explosive anger that simmered right below the surface. Chris remembered crying lakes of tears, the tears running hot down his cheeks and behind his ears, leaving crusty tracks that turned into sores.

They’d driven in a big circle and heat shimmered the road ahead of them into puddles. Chris hoped they wouldn’t accidentally drive into the water. Up ahead, they saw cars parked up on a road above the road they were on.
            “Oh my god!” said Clare, as Janice whipped across the lane and sped up onto the higher road. Chris’s heart raced.
            Chris’s eyes had to adjust for a moment to take in what spread out before them, a silver plane of water blended with the washed-out blue of the sun-drenched sky.
            Out of the car, there was a slight breeze off the water and the air was distinctly cooler.
            “It’s real,” Clare said. “I really hadn’t believed it existed or that if we found it, it would be nearly as majestic.”
            The four of them walked down the levee along and above the water’s edge. They stood at the edge of the lake, admiring its vastness. Chris took a selfie of them all. Mark turned to a family flying a drone and began to engage in his usual two minute round of questions with the family. Are you rocking and rolling? How’s life? Janice, Chris, and Clare walked down an incline to the edge of the water lapping at the shore.
            “I wonder if we can swim in it?” said Chris.
            “No!” said Clare. “It’s poisonous. There’s dairies and pesticides and all kinds of toxins in there.”
            They contemplated the telephone poles whose tops poked up out of the water as three dark geese flew over.
            Janice swung her head around. “Where’s your dad?” she said.
            Chris looked to the top of the embankment. The family was still there, but Mark was not. “Oh geez,” he said and jogged up to the top.
            Janice and Clare were right behind him. “Mark?” called his mom.
            “Dad?” called Clare.
            “Did you see which way our dad went?” Chris asked the family.
            “No,” they said. They were busy with the drone.
            Janice and Clare went one way, Chris the opposite. He jogged down the top of the levee. He imagined his dad wandering out in the orchards and fields, down a country road somewhere.  Or even wading out into the toxic waters of the lake. Who knew what he’d do?
            Then he heard a long blast of a car horn. He turned around and went back.
            Chris approached the flat area where the cars were parked and there was his dad, in the car, laying on the horn like a maniac.
            “Let’s go!” Mark called out from the driver’s seat and honked the horn again.
            Chris walked up to him. “Enough with the horn. I thought you went into the lake.”
            “What lake?” said his dad.
            “This lake,” Chris said and motioned with his arm. 
            “Where are we,” Mark said.
            “In the country.”
            “What country?”
            Chris sighed. 

That night Chris dreamed that his father began to walk slowly out into the lake. “Hey hey, don’t go out there!” Chris yelled. “It’s poisonous, you’ll get hurt!” But his father continued to walk until the water passed his knees, his waist, his chest, up to his shoulders.
            He looked back at Chris over his shoulder, and it was the father of Chris’s youth, the father of the dark black hair, almost blue, the bushy red beard. But his eyes were kind. His eyes smiled as if to say, “It’s going to be alright.”
            Chris pushed out into the water after him without any thought of what was underneath or  toxic. Chest deep, Chris reached out to grab his father, to pull him back, but he had disappeared. And then the water was gone, too.
            Chris fell to his knees and clutched the soil, but there was only sandy dirt in his hands. He let the dirt pour out between his fingers under the blazing sun. Tears poured down his cheeks. He was crying rivers. But it wasn’t enough to save his father. It wasn’t enough to refill the lake.

– Jeremy Mumford