When I was ten, my parents moved us from a bustling suburb of San Francisco to a country town in central Wisconsin. Forty-five hundred farm-community souls perched along a string of lakes, twenty-two of them in all—big enough, each one, to water ski or pontoon across.
The shorelines of the lakes were dotted with clapboard cottages, shutters and screens that flapped and shimmied in a humid August storm—the Midwestern kind that rolled in on an army of close clouds in six minutes, blanketing the sky with a smoky black shroud. The heavens would roil and spit, warm rain pelting the pine-needled, tufted ground; the lightning struck, flash-framing everything in slow motion film flicks, thunder cracking over the water. Thirty minutes later, the clouds blown by, the blue-blue of the Wisconsin sky would reflect in the watery green of the lake’s unstirring mirror, the fireworks over and muggy heat broken, if only for an hour or two.
Every summer there, my parents rented a cabin on Miner Lake—one of the twenty-two—and we left our house in town for a month, packing our family across the few miles to the screened-in cottage. I was eleven the first year we landed there, and I spent hours on my own, canoeing through the shallow no-wake channels that connected each lake, small veins flowing to a new set of floating docks, another water body.
We didn’t have lakes like these in California. We’d only known ocean: the whip and snap of it at Half Moon Bay, minutes from the city, the freezing fog that nipped at our shoulders and froze our toes, even in the summer sea. Rip tides that pulled me down from a body-surfing wave into a swirling black hole of water, then slammed me to the murky sand. There was a thrill in the ocean’s endlessness, the mystery of places that lay across the world, unseen; the ragged cliffs behind us bracketing unknown lands to sail or fly to someday as an adult.
The lake, by turns, was contained, much like the State—Wisconsin: no seaward coast, no vast mountainside or rough cliffs at the edge of a continent. It was placid, serene; the smell of it ripe and fresh in my nose, like green grass mulched with something swampy and sour. The scent of pine was everywhere—tall, skyward-reaching trees with sticky bark stuck up densely from the ground like giant pretzel sticks poked into the pliable earth, hundreds of them on the soft, sloping shore; pine cones the size of apples clunked down on shingled roofs. The dank whiff of rotting wood permeated the pines, cottage siding and rickety piers and swaying docks undulating a good hundred feet from the waterline—each tiny house with its own anchored float, rough wood nailed over rusting barrels.
My father had bought a restaurant in town, The Waupaca Café—known for its homemade pies with sweet, flakey crusts, house-made doughnuts, frosting-smeared cinnamon rolls that filled the whole block with their irresistible aroma. At dinner, fried chicken, baked ham, roast pork, buttery mashed potatoes. Dad would duck out during the day to work, while the rest of us lolled around on docks jutting into the softly lapping waves, had late breakfasts and lunches, read summer books.
At age eleven, I was already seeking my own company, yearning for adventure; to be “out there” by myself. I’d had a long year in a too-close, sixth grade classroom with a cranky, near-retirement teacher named Eva Petersen—Mrs. Petersen—who we all called “Iron Hips,” a retaliatory kick-back for her absolute meanness. She liked to refuse to let us go to the bathroom or to band class, she’d keep us from ever having a recess on some whim, some behavioral transgression of one kid’s or another’s that we’d all get punished for. There was a thermostat in our classroom across from a shut-up bank of windows, and she’d stick a wet paper towel over it so the gauge would read cold and overheat the room like a sauna, condensation running down the glass.
Chris Neilsen, who was always a screw-up and whom she made sit in the front row, liked to flail his pencils at the dotted-hole, wood fiber ceiling tiles whenever Mrs. Petersen turned to the chalkboard, seeing if he could make the No.2’s stick. The last two weeks of school had been awful—me overly antsy, way into June; so strange coming from California, where school ended just after Labor Day—and Mrs. Peterson was at her worst, ready to pounce. One afternoon, Neilsen flung his pencil up—he’d gotten good at it, they almost always stuck, and when one didn’t, he was quick to catch it before Iron Hips could lethargically turn and spot him. But this day, she turned those wide hips in a hot second, and the thing fell—boink—on his head, bounced off its rubber eraser from his skull and hurled toward her, poking its sharp point into her gingham dress as if it knew to aim directly at her pubes. We all laughed uproariously—I’ve always had my mother’s laugh; a hearty guffaw—and Mrs. Petersen came to stand over me. There were a handful of us in class who played instruments and we were already five minutes late for band practice, waiting with baited breath for her to let us go.
“You’re never going to band again!” she screamed at me.
I looked up—who knows what made me do it—and said, “Band is a class like any other class. We’re going! You can’t make us stay!”
I got up, and twenty-four fiery, fearful eyes shot my way.
“Come on!” I said. “Let’s go!”
“How dare you?” she blared. She turned to the faces. “Which one of you is going to have the audacity to be led around by the nose by this mouthy, disobedient girl from California?”
She said it with hate, as if where I came from was the depths of purgatory.
I picked up my drum, my instrument, from the back cubby, clunked the thing toward the door. “My mother will be calling the principal, just so you know!” And I stormed out.
My mother did. And the last days of Eva Petersen petered out, her huffing around my chair and giving me dirty looks, not speaking to me at all.
It was my first recognition that I could win one by speaking up, my first experience with the pressure-cooker of awful situations that I needed to get out of.
By the time I got to the lake, I was achingly happy to be done, finished—over with that damned woman and the cloying, claustrophobic classroom.
The second day we were at the cottage on Miner, my mother gave me and my siblings a couple of bucks to walk down to the Busy Bee, a tiny, bright yellow market on the twisting main road a half-mile away. It was hot, we were sweaty, the stickiness damp in our T-shirts, feet sliding in our lace-up tennies with no socks. Soft-serve was what we were after—fifty cents for a double-size in a sugar cone—the owner, a woman with a huge gray beehive, tiny red bows placed in it, a giggling laugh. I’d watch as she slowly let the ice cream fill the bottom of the cone: one loop, two loops, three. Oh, divine! No perching it on the rim, she was filling the whole delicious cocoon of a cone. She swirled more slowly as she reached the air, building a pyramid of sugary lines that finished in a dramatic twist, a sweep into the air with Bee Hive’s lovely hands finessing the point. Then, sprinkles from her spoon—pink, yellow, and chocolate—now handed over the low counter, and life was a sweet heaven again.
Back to the cottage for lunch after a slow stroll, tuna fish on whole wheat or cheese and avocado sandwiches—the avocado a thing ordered from some other State, no one knew what they were just then in Central Wisconsin. It was my Dad’s clout with Ev at Ev’s Market that got them to us, his buying power from his restaurant funding the special order.
Mom wouldn’t let us swim after eating, we had to wait at least forty-five minutes—an eternity at eleven years old; we were so ready for that lake water and champing at the bit. But Mom insisted.
“That’s an old wives’ tale!” I said after my avocado and whole wheat were gone.
“That’s right!” my sister shouted.
My lanky limbs felt like a colt’s legs aching for land, but mine wanted water.
“Well, I’m a wife, so there.” Mom was barely paying attention, a magazine in her face. “And you’re making me old with your whining, so stop it…”
I kept on. “How come I can ride a bike after lunch and not get sick? What’s water got to do with it?”
Mom went back to her Newsweek. “Indulge me, okay? I’m a mother.”
“Dad would let us!” I cried.
“Ha!” she said, flipping her magazine page with a snap. “You try getting your father out of that restaurant! I can’t!”
A throw-away line, a Mom-thing—nothing, at age eleven, to chew on or worry over.
Exactly forty-five minutes later, by the tick-tick-tock of a loud plastic wall clock with a black cow on its face, we bolted out the screens and down the raked hill to the lake. I yanked the canoe from its pine-needled dirt, my two sisters took the rowboat, my little brother wore his orange life vest and splashed into a giant inner tube.
The lake was still there, in its majesty, its simple sameness: cool and airily lightweight as I plunged my feet into its watery edge next to the canoe, minnows and perch darting at my bare toes, jolty fishy movements in the waving grass of the shallow water. Boats swayed on rickety piers in neighboring cottages, the wake of a water-skier swelling beneath them. Some kind of hawking bird, I couldn’t see what, probably barking at the outboard motor, but I crooked my head to the shoreline pines just the same. A perch nibbled at the skin atop my foot, a quick, tiny pinch, then scurried away, its shadow chasing itself.
Mom shouted through the screened porch. “You guys come back before four! It’s going to storm!”
I was paddling fast already, but in two hops Mom was at the end of the pier. “I mean it! Lightning and lake water do not mix!”
“Okay, Mom! We heard you!”
“Just, please—”
But we were gone.
“Oh, good grief…” I heard her mutter, giving up. She found a chair under a pine, sat down with her magazine.
It was a freedom I felt like a filly let loose from a stable, a jump-step into my own life away, somewhere else, my paddle digging hard along the aluminum canoe, water splashing on my bare legs as I made the thing move. In ten minutes, I was on my own, out of Miner and through the tight channel into Dake Lake. More oaring, and into Columbia with a quick spin past ‘The Casino’—a big barn of a place with a beat-up bar, a creaky wooden dance floor, an outside deck on the water where cute guys from out of town hung out. I was eleven, overly-tall enough to fake being fourteen at least, but there was nothing to do about it but to wish and want and gaze longingly. A few strong-looking guys with shaggy, Rock ’n Roll hair around their ears in cut-offs and no shirts, red lips and beers snuck behind their backs on the outside deck, and any one of them could make me want to kiss—soon, please God, soon!—their eyes catching mine with a quick rush up my thighs.
From Columbia, I paddled to Round Lake and Brown’s Point, an isthmus of sand at the juncture of McCrossen where older teenagers played volleyball in two feet of water and pretended to accidentally fall on each other’s bikini-ed and briefed bodies as they lunged for a shot.
I watched for a while, wanting to be them—older, make me older!—then turned back, storm clouds gathering on one corner of the western pines.
Sure enough, Mom was right. Paddling fast, I saw the unbelievable blackening of the sky—it was sunny six minutes ago!—the little piers wobbling in the quickening wind, the stop-gasp of no breath while the earth changed its mind and took a left turn off its summer path.
I’d barely gotten the canoe—aluminum, a lightning rod—tucked up the shoreline and under the trees before the rain started pelting me, a dump like God had decided to pour buckets from the sky in one split-second, fell swoop.
“Help me!” Mom yelled, giggling and waving her hands. She loved the drama—the slap-slap of the shutters we could never get closed in time, the hooks on them inevitably flying free, rattling and slamming the things against the solid wood siding of the cottage.
She was running now, shuttering and banging, the little doors were flapping. Slam! Slam! Slam!
“Isn’t this great?!” she screamed.
The lightning began to strike, and I could see my siblings huddled inside the screened porch in flash-frames of light, looks on their faces, like, what’s wrong with her? Mom and I were running from window to window, fighting against the pelting rain and the electrical currents splashing in slow-motion cuts.
“Dear, God! I love this!” she hollered. “You guys! Isn’t this amazing?”
Not, “Hey you kids, I’m right here. I know it’s scary.” But, “Whoa! That was a big one! Don’t you want one that’s bigger? Louder? Shout! Come on! Bigggggger!!” She looked up at the sky, drenched now, thrilled.
Once we were all inside, there was a rattling of the ground under us, the cottage walls flimsy and age-weary, my brother and two sisters running around the fireplace in a comical dance—half-fear, half-thrill, Mom egging them on.
“Oh, yes! Foundation-rattling! That’s what we want! Clap, you guys! Yell!”
Two hours later, Dad was back and the place was as tranquil as a forty-acre corn field, barely a breeze, the sun burning orange and turquoise across the lake and the tops of the pines.
After dinner—barbequed Bratwurst, Dad’s favorite—we sat on the pier, us kids with our feet dangling in the water, a bath-warm temperature. Tiny gnats swam at our heads, dragonflies landed lightly on our forearms. Nobody said much, we kind of hung out, butts on the weathered wood, a spirited moment of witnessing beauty that quieted our whole family.
“ ‘In all the world…no lakes like these,’ ” Dad said. It was a Waupaca Chamber of Commerce line, up on some billboard or printed on a pamphlet someplace, and still it felt right, a truism I recognized even then, at eleven.
Years passed there, summers glorious and uncomplicated.
The last summer we came to the lake I was fifteen, and things had begun to unstitch themselves at the seams of my parents’ marriage. It was a tension I could feel, like thick glue had been poured into the space between them, an abyss of a canyon that kept them from ever stepping nearer, no longer engulfed with each other, staying far away and un-stuck. What would come later, the unraveling and divorce, my mother’s affair and flight from our town, the ties of our family unbraiding, straw-like strands fraying from a once-tight rope—all of that, I would not yet know that summer.
But it was the last of something, something I didn’t know to prize or hold tightly.
I wouldn’t know, either, how closely I would want to hold the summers before, the peace and the laughter, the silly fights over stupid things—whining to go swimming after eating, who got the Busy Bee ice cream cone first from the Bee Hive lady, who took the boat to The Casino before dinner without asking. Then, those perfect moments: rain pelting my mother as she ran like a banshee from window to window, yelling to me—unknowing then, no plans for any other life—hilariously giggling as the shutters rattled and slapped the cottage’s siding. The rich smells of Bratwurst sizzling on the open flame, Dad standing with tongs in his hands, humming some tune and smiling when I looked up at him. Mosquitos coming after us at the end of the day, gnats and dragonflies and sometimes even horseflies, us batting them around our heads, plunging into the tepid water in our T-shirts and shorts to get them off.
The sweet end of the day, sitting still on the sharpness of the wood-weathered pier under our bare legs, pink tinges in the sky’s dome over my still-knit-together family, nobody saying a word.
Just the lovely mirror of that water, reflecting itself back to us, untroubled and smooth, no sign of anything dying, broken, or lost.
It was life, in its perfection. Our timeless and unending life, at the lake.
