Photograph by Greg Rannells
January is the roughest. Wind slaps white crusts on the lake’s choppy waves. Across so much open water, even on calm mornings in January, a bitter, angry cold shoves back when you pedal onto the asphalt trail against it. And there is the bike’s odometer, depressingly low, all those hard-earned miles zeroed out at the new year, all electronically erased. Time to start again, to see how many miles I can click off before next December, to see if I can beat last year’s record.
It is the largest natural lake in the state, originally a kink of the Missouri River, which flows less than a mile away today. The Missouri’s antediluvian banks are still obvious, intimidating bluffs all along the south side of the trail and wandering off to the west, parallel with what was once an animal track, then an Indian path, then the Old Plank Road, now known as Olive. Some seismic shudder or a stupendous flood bent the river’s course. Creve Coeur Lake was left behind. Nineteenth-century maps of the area belie the sappy legend of an “Indian princess” who leapt to her brokenhearted death here—it’s the shape of the lakes that gives Creve Coeur its name. Originally there were two lakes, a pair of curved shapes that looked, from above, like a valentine heart torn apart. The southern lake disappeared long ago, clogged into stagnant shallows, then overtaken with the same silt that would have eventually turned the remaining lake into a meadow, too, had the county not mounted a massive dredging operation here in the ’60s and then again only a few years ago.
Creve Coeur Lake’s more recent history is both lurid and pastoral. In the ’20s, it was a haven for city-dwellers who took the trolley there. Grand floating pavilions, swimming areas, even a towering sightseeing platform that was moved from the World’s Fair and re-erected on a hillside near the trolley-car turnaround. Prohibition transformed the lakeshore into a tangled rat’s nest of speakeasies, smoke-filled private “clubs,” and brothels. A two-story brick house that combined the lake’s two eras still stands off by itself, surrounded by river-bottom fields. Up until the ’30s, the house was a bordello throughout the week; on weekends, families congregated there for lavish fried-chicken dinners. By the early ’60s, silty muck and trash left the lake knee-deep; water-skiers wore shoes to avoid being cut by broken glass on the bottom. By the ’70s, ecological concerns and a need for suburban green space combined to revive the lake and its woods, meadows, and shores. Ball fields followed, and the pillars of the Page Avenue extension bridge loom over one end of the lake. But the place is still wild in spots, still a piece of the country Lewis and Clark might recognize.
At the lake, I am pedaling away from some of my own history. My father had a heart attack before he was 50. Every lap I complete is meant to scour my arteries clean, to keep my heart muscles quick, to hold onto what little is left of the vitality of middle age. My path seems longer in winter’s cold. But the distance is the same in November as it is in June: a 3.4-mile loop around the lake. You can rack up more mileage if you take one of the side trails, but I tend to stick to the main course. Left, out of the parking lot, past the waterfall that is no more than a dribble unless it’s rained hard, and into thick, shady oak woods that push against the trail on one side, the edge of the lake close by on the other. After a thunderstorm, one of the ancient oaks will sometimes have given up here, crashing across the trail, forcing me to dismount and carry the bike over the limbs until a crew comes by and fires up the chain saws. Then there is a turn, running past a swampy inlet of the lake where snowy blossoms of native marshmallows bloom in late summer. Then over a bridge above a canal linking the lake with a newly dredged, smaller lake, and on autumn mornings here, the still surface of the canal is carpeted with lemony willow leaves, a perfect picture of transitory beauty. The trail turns again, past the park’s soccer fields and then over the boathouse bridge and along the broad sweep of beach. It is always the same, always changing, and I can reckon seasons just by watching the trail below as I ride along it.
On dewy July mornings, hundreds of snails scrunch across the asphalt, weaving shiny, slimy threads. September begins with grasshoppers, twitching and whirring; soon after, the “wooly-worm” caterpillars, with their furry-banded coats of russet and jet, trundle busily by. And then there is that morning when the trail, clean only the day before, is flecked with dry, tan cottonwood leaves, crunching beneath my tires. If I haven’t gotten in 1,000 miles by then, I know it’s time to pick up the pace. It will only be weeks before puddles on the trail freeze, skins of dark ice nearly spilling me more than once, and then my teeth will rattle as I bounce through snowy, slush-frozen ruts. In spring, fluffy bundles of cottonwood seed again drift like dust bunnies. I have to be careful in May, avoiding the links of scat left on the trail by raccoons fattening on the bounty.
On warm weekends, the trail bustles with activity. There are ambling families, lovers, picnickers looking for just the spot, strollers, rollerbladers, and bicyclists, from the skintight-suited, calf-bulging athletes to the plodders like me. Weekday mornings when I ride, the numbers are smaller. Still, there is never a day, even a gray, frigid one when I am riding through a fine sleet, when I have the park to myself. There are the regulars. There is a zaftig young mother, pushing her baby’s cart, her long dreadlocks blowing. I have decided, for no logical reason, that these daily walks are her respite from a loveless marriage. Pencil-legged, like Gloria Swanson ready for her close-up, a skeletal matron is always in full, garish makeup, always in a churning, determined stride to some anorexic destination. A glamour photographer uses sunsets at the lake’s beach, snapping pictures of swimsuited models who pose waist-deep in the lake and, when there aren’t any passersby near, drop their tops. An old Chinese lady does her qigong internal exercises under a picnic shelter while her husband sits and watches the lake. On the water, a pecking order exists. Until fragile ice doilies lace the water around their dock, the rowers are out every day. Their sculls and shells slice razor streaks across the water, coxswains barking cadence. They have seniority here. The 1904 Olympic rowing competition was held at the lake, and rowers are the lake’s upper crust. Sailors are next. Sunday regattas put two dozen craft in the water, from little Lightning rigs to stubby-masted, bucket-like punts to a magnificent, handmade counter-stern sloop thin as a cigar, its wooden sides glowing, a knife under sail. Kayakers are the arrivistes, gathering on Wednesday evenings to paddle. Windsurfers are the lake’s counterculture, the bad boys, ripping across the water, making wide turns, showing off.
There are other regulars, too. The Canadian goose, the pinions of one wing warped awkwardly, probably after failing to yield to a car on the road, is always at the edge of the big flocks, somehow surviving. Neon blue buntings pinball through the brush; an orange-winged oriole flickers through the deeper woods. Night herons perch motionless. Gulls chatter and eagles drift silently all winter. In summer, at the spillway at the far end of the lake, half a dozen water snakes gather below the foot-tall falls. They have learned to anticipate meals washing over. They rise up out of the water like little cobras, backs arced into S shapes, watching, waiting for a silvery flash. After a hard rain, the lake rises enough that carp longer than my arm come up from the creek below, heaving themselves up the frothy spillway falls to get into the lake, and a Mumbai family, the women resplendent in saris, gathers to watch the spectacle, the grandfather bubbling excitedly at the appearance of every carp, “Ohh, he a beeg fella, dat one!”
I keep track of the languages I overhear on the trail. Hindi, Mandarin, Spanish, singsong Cambodian and guttural Russian: On summer evenings, the lake’s fishable shores look like the UN. These are people fishing not for fun but for dinner. A young Mexican flirts with a Chinese girl, showing her the weave and weights of his casting net. She plays along for a while but eventually grows impatient: “Throw it! Catch me something!”
Snatches of such conversations, faces, nature’s vignettes—they all unfold in front of me at 15 miles an hour, 82 cranks of the pedal, 124 heartbeats to the minute. Days of perfect blue overhead, the lake shimmering, others when thunderstorms gobble up the horizon, bruised clouds turning the water to tarnished silver. Satisfied, I watch the numbers swell on the bike’s odometer with another cycle of the seasons at this lake. Only occasionally do I glance behind as I ride—and see, each time I do, that there is not a trace of my passing.
Dave Lowry, St. Louis Magazine’s lead dining critic, is the author of 12 books, including The Connoisseur’s Guide to Sushi (2006) and The Karate Way: Discovering the Spirit of Practice (2009). His writing has also appeared in Coastal Living, Playboy, and Winds, the former in-flight magazine of Japan Airlines. Lowry recently put his 6,000th mile on his bike, cycling around his favorite St. Louis lake.
