Suspended with feet drifting up for the
surface in water as clear as the air, face down with one hand clamped
on a piling grown slimy with feathery green algae. Frozen in breath-holding time above a clean cobble bottom –
this is how I first fell in love.
 |
| It wasn't big, but it was ours |
Records were kept on index cards in
little wooden boxes at the public beach house back then, the gateway to all summer fun, much like Mom's
box of cards for creating cherry cheesecake and
Salisbury steak at home. In a rite of spring dripping with that rare
satisfaction rendered when the “have-nots” triumph over the
“haves,” local kids would troop into that little clapboard beach
house, and announce our names a
little too loudly in case there were any rich kids
from Illinois within hearing distance. Surnames would be ticked off
on the cards, and small fabric seasonal passes would be freely
dispensed from a roll much like tickets at a raffle, square nylon
patches little more than an inch square with the year embroidered in a circle
around the perimeter. One for each member of the household and a few
extras for guests. But ours came from the roll with the colored
embroidery thread. We got red or blue or sometimes gold, depending
on the year, while those from away got only black and only after they payed.
That little colored badge of honor was
quickly sewn on the lower left thigh of your trunks to be displayed
proudly for the gate attendants and life guards the rest of the
splashing and frolicking summer, and more importantly, for the kids
emerging from shiny foreign cars with air conditioning and upholstery
who had to hot-foot it all the way across the sweltering blacktop to
the far entrance of the public beach. The yuppie scum.
All socioeconomic injustices
temporarily waylaid, we were free to cross the much shorter route to
our gated private beach. Or, more often, to simply hop the fence and
tear down to the water in unbridled youthful glee for a day of
cannonballs and jacknives on top of each other. The gate attendants
knew who we were anyway. They were our babysitters and waitresses in
winter.
In our house we had to finish our
chores before mounting bikes for the almost daily speed run down the
huge hill to the water, and I submit that was cruel and unusual
punishment. Dishes or vacuuming or the inexorable pain of cleaning a
bathroom. Imagine the horror. But once our work was done we were set free to rocket
our way to sunburned freedom. On that ride down “The Big Hill” I
was stopped more than once by Mr. Hutchinson, the town cop, for
passing cars on my single-minded mission to achieve soggy summer fun. The posted speed limit there was (and still is) a residentially staid
30mph, and I can happily recall glancing over to see the startled
visages of drivers as I shot idiotically by on the double yellow
line. I cringe to think of the stitches and dental work (or much worse) that
would've been involved had I ever put that old Schwinn down as it
began to shimmy and wobble in my haste to get to the beach.
As we grew into rowdy young men,
burgeoning with hormones but still too young to drive, the true proof
of manhood among us was the ability to ride our bikes back up that
same hill at the end of the swimming day without once touching the
handlebars. A feat I came very close to achieving many times, but
never completed, I'm sorry to report. I can rest easy now, from the remove
of adulthood, with the fact that I failed. I believe all claims of having achieved
this monumental task were exaggerated or flatly untrue. I don't
think it's possible for a kid to do, and you wouldn't either if you saw the hill or a topo map. Except for maybe in the case of
Brian. He claims to have done it a generation before me, and I
believe him. He's not normal.
Yet another rite into young manhood was
the willingness to sleep “under the stars.” There came a time
when even the flimsy comforts of a tent and foam pad were eschewed by
all who wished to deem themselves men of the woods. We'd practice
our young bushcraft skills, often giving up on the bow and drill fire
in collective resignation that a one-match fire was almost as cool as
a no-match fire and far more comforting than none at all. Having mutilated a couple flimsy perch or shiners
with a fillet knife and fire, and maybe with some wild greens or berries, we'd enjoy our paltry repast. Things
were sometimes bolstered with hot dogs or beans or Oreos from home,
but young mountain men in the making have amazing powers of selective
memory, and these treats we summarily erased from the public record.
We'd stretch out in the grass and gaze up at the stars, fully codified in the belief that we would one day
be remembered among names like Boone, Lewis, and Clark. But here's
the thing: Even on warm summer nights, even as a malleable, nearly
indestructible pre-teen, you don't get a lot of sleep sprawled out
right in the dirt. Not if you've evolved past that stage twenty-five
millennia prior to trying it again, anyway.
So we'd be up early. Very early. In
that light that isn't really even light yet -- the bottomless pre-dawn
calm. A time of day known best to duck hunters, third-shifters,
and young knuckleheads who think it's rad to dirtbag it right on the
ground.
What was there to do at this hour? The
same thing there was to do every day all summer long – make for the
beach.
Lake Geneva is one of the largest
kettle lakes in Wisconsin. A kettle lake, in quick and dirty lay
terms, being a dent in the ground left by a retreating glacier and
filled with water. It is spring fed, deep and cold, and almost
heartrendingly clear. Like looking through a window into the earth. One
of those lakes where you park the boat in twenty five feet of
crystalline water to fish for spawning bluegills in fifteen feet of
water, instead of anchoring in five to cast up into two. And
sometimes, if you're paying close attention when you pull a thick spinning gill up out of those depths, you will notice a long, heavy pike
or musky hovering deep down there in the wet void. A monster of the deep
glaring back up through the window.
Standing in the fishing section of the
local Fleet Farm (a mid-western hardware store chain) the other day,
I spied the cardboard and plastic packets of Eagle Claw snelled
hooks. The very same packs that inhabit every tackle shop, hardware
store, and gas station peg board near water in the known universe,
and seemingly have since the beginning of time. They have bronze finish bait
holder hooks or little gold aberdeens snelled with an eight-inch
leader and a loop on the running end. You know the ones. I know who
buys them too – twelve-year-old boys who ride their bikes down The
Big Hill to the beach before the sun comes up.
Seeing those snells hanging there, I
was instantly transported back to that little beach in the last throes of
night, the sun not yet coming up over the drumlins seven miles to the east across the flat, dark plane.
Armed with the loop of one of those snells over your little finger, you could slip into that cold spring
water and swim out to the weed line at the very deepest reaches of the white
and blue swimming pier. A few big breaths to prepare, and then a
long dive down through the clear nothingness to the bottom in earliest slanting dawn.
Grab onto the pier and hover there. The shimmering mosaic of flat round skipping stones before you in the quickly gathering morning, nature's
most perfect fresco. Let the twinkling golden hook fall from your
hand and hang by its leader. Still yourself. Just be. If you are
patient, if you become nothing in the water with your bowl cut hair
standing on end and tickling, a curious sunfish will come up
from the sashaying green and bite that bare hook, and you will be
pinky fishing in paradise.
