Part of Mr. Roth’s maintenance included capturing small wild animals and disposing of them. Often in the morning, we would see him walking through the yard with a squirrel or raccoon in a live trap. We would usually be in the house as he took the cage down to the bank and set it in the water to forcibly drown the creature inside. After several minutes of thrashing about, he would pull the cage out and carry it back by the house. This was a gruesome sight that served no purpose, and since nobody in my family hunted or trapped animals, we were not used to seeing anything like this. Still, I watched this act with that morbid curiosity of a child.
Soon after we arrived, Dad and Mr. Hardy would tow the boat down to a landing to set it into the water. There were actually two boats involved with our stay at The Lake. The first boat was an odd looking affair with a seating arrangement that had two distinct bench seats separated by a deck. One of my very first memories of being at The Lake was being helped out of this boat. I may have only been three years old, but I remember wearing my tiny life jacket as somebody lifted me out of the seat and onto the dock. The boat was unusual in that the driver sat in the back and looked over the heads of any passengers in the front. Powered by a small motor, it was not fast, but could pull one skier fairly well. The boat, with the strange seating arrangement and burgundy and aluminum colors, had a unique nickname. My Dad and Mr. Hardy called this the Nigger boat. By any standard then and today, this was a vulgar expression, however, in the mid 1960s for two men who grew up in the depression and fought in WWII, this prejudice was in line with where they came from. Even at that age though, my sensibilities knew this was not an appropriate term to use, but I was compelled to later ask Bill where this came from. Bill explained they called it this because you rode in the back. This boat was eventually replaced with one that had a conventional seating arrangement and a red deck and white fiberglass body. This was christened the "Barracuda Queen", a name that seemed to have no meaning. My only guess is that it sounded cool and Dad had a particular liking for Plymouth Barracudas. Adding Queen made this into a proper boat name.
With the boat in the water, the car unpacked and the initial excitement expended, the family and friends would settle in for the two weeks. Most mornings started quietly. Often I would wake up early, come downstairs to the front room and look out at the lake. Mom, an incurable insomniac, would have already been up for several hours. Usually, I looked out at the lake below and saw her sitting in a lawn chair on the dock, smoking one of many cigarettes that day and drinking a cup of strong percolated black coffee. When I saw her, I come out of the house and climb down the long stone stairway that went to the shore. There she would be, glad to see me awake. I would walk out on the dock, still bleary eyed from having only woken a few minutes before, and go over and stand next to her as she took the last few puffs and downed the remainder of the coffee. She often spent the mornings there before anyone else was up, looking out over the glass smooth lake if it was calm, or watching the sailboats tool around before the speed boats came out and chopped up the water.
Years later, I was to learn that this was her favorite part of the vacation, and she really did not see this yearly ritual as a relaxing time. Once her quiet moments on the dock were over, she would spend most of the day fixing food, doing laundry and trying to take care of the family. When the opportunity presented itself, she would take the time to drive into the surrounding countryside to buy produce and eggs. There were stores in the area she could have easily gone to, but she enjoyed finding food at local farms for part of our groceries. I can distinctly remember going with her to a farm and standing in the kitchen while Mom paid the farmwoman for a batch of eggs as I watched a boy about my age eat breakfast. As he picked through a bowl of what was probably oatmeal while sitting in that dingy kitchen, I stood there in my nice neat shorts and shirt. The boy never looked up or seemed to acknowledge we were in the same room. Instead, he methodically moved the spoon between the few inches from the bowl to his face. The place reeked of farm animals, a smell that is always offensive to people who do not grow up around livestock. I did not know what to make of him, and felt both sorry for his condition and embarrassed to be standing there in my clean clothes.
We usually spent much of our day in the boat. Dad was incredibly patient in trying to teach the older children how to ski, all the time starting and stopping the boat as one kid after another tried to master the trick of sliding on the water. I was too young to ski so I rode along with the wind whipping across my home barber kit summer crew cut, calling out when the skier went down. By the time I was five or six, I was allowed to drive the boat under supervision, though never to pull skiers. Today, this would probably be illegal, and when I think of a six year old driving a speedboat, I am stunned. Then, they thought nothing of setting me behind the wheel when the lake cleared late in the day and shooting off across the water.
Throughout this constant stream of activity, Mom and Dad never spent that much time together, other than the barbeques and bridge games. I was not privy or aware of what was going on between my parents, but theirs was not a settled and affectionate relationship. My mother was born Jewish and grew up in constant poverty and some of my Dad’s relatives never accepted her into the family. The Howard’s had come from a long line of solid Presbyterians who arrived into the Boston area in the mid 1600’s and worked their way to Michigan and on to Minnesota and Wisconsin. My mother’s family, the Cohen’s, more or less showed up around 1905, with relations from Poland, maybe Lithuania, or possibly Russia and Hungary. This vacation was never comfortable for her, and years later, she told me that even though she was accepted into this circle of friends, her background always made her feel different. Knowing that group of people as I do, I doubt they truly ostracized her though she still felt separated due to her ethnicity. When she was with them she always seemed to be enjoying herself, but impressions are often difficult to decipher. Upon reflection as an adult, and now understanding her better, I realize those quiet moments in the morning sitting on the dock were her real vacation. The still water was her solace. She said that when she died, she wished to have her ashes scattered on Medicine Lake in Minnesota were she had played as a girl. When she did finally pass, we rented a boat and chose a calm quiet part in a cove of Medicine Lake as her final resting place.
During the day, Bill and I spent most of our other time in the water until we puckered up like pale prunes. We had a few water toys, one of which was a small blue plastic boat that was just big enough for the two of us to sit in and float around. Somewhere in our young minds, we realized that floating in a tiny boat with your brother lacked the needed excitement. Always in search for the next best thing, we one day looked at the hill leading down from the house to the shore and put the two together. We started hauling the boat to the top of the hill and pushing each other off. It was a hell of a fast bumpy ride that ended at the top of a four-foot retaining wall. This was tremendous until Mr. Roth came by and exclaimed, "What happened to my grass?" The boat was relegated to water use, however years later we discovered it made a decent snow sled. During the sledding incarnation of the boat, one of us ran over my friend Glenn Thurman’s head. He said he looked up and saw me coming in the blue boat, and then the next thing he knew his face was being slammed into the snow. I don’t remember doing this, and think he was addled by the boat going up his back and over his head. There was no injury, and I forgot to ask why he just didn’t get out of the way.
Our two weeks at The Lake continued this way with no real commitments other than riding in the boat and playing in the water. We also celebrated Bill’s birthday on July 5th, an event that he thought was the entire reason for the vacation. However, vacations always draw to a close, and each year leaving was difficult. By the time I was six, the family began to drift in another direction. Towards the end of our visits there, Susie and Barbie were of college age and had other things going on in the summer. Unbeknownst to me at th
e time, the biggest influence was an impending job change for Dad. He had been working as VP of at vegetable packer in Portland, where the owner’s son-in-law had taken over the company and put Dad into a much lower position. These changes were going on around me, and though I was too young to grasp the dynamics, I knew the not too distant future was going to be different.
There was never a definitive statement that we were not going back, but on the last day as we packed things away, I had a sense this was not like the previous year. One of the final tasks was to pull the boat out of the water. I had been trying to learn how to ski and I was going to have one last chance in the few hours left. It was cold that morning, but I jumped in and slipped the skis over my feet. I lined up behind the boat with my ski tips sticking out of the water and the rope running between them. It took a few tries, but finally I came out of water and looked down at my six year old legs going into the full sized adult skis. I wobbled around for about fifty feet then fell down. There was no more time left, so we had to bring the boat over to the landing.
As we were getting ready to take the boat out, I must have talked about trying again the following summer, but received an answer that amounted to a maybe. When you are very young, you often do not comprehend all the words, but know the meaning behind them or sense the body language. There was a resignation that I must have noticed. Driving home, I heard sniffles from the other side of the back seat, and saw Bill looking out the window as tears ran down his face. We both sensed this pull into another era of our lives, though neither of us knew the workings behind this. Later the following year, Dad would quit his job, to get away from the son-in-law that had taken over the business. The next summer there was no vacation, and never a mention of going to The Lake again.
With five children, Barbie in Carthage College, a private school in Wisconsin, Dad decided to start a couple of Laundromats, one in Coloma, Michigan and another in nearby Benton Harbor, while taking a sales job at a nearby fruit packer. There was also rental property in Benton Harbor that had belonged to his family for decades that he wanted to maintain. One could look at this move and call him either brave or foolish. Maybe both. He was fifty-two years old, and over the previous couple decades had moved across the country chasing jobs, and this may have seemed like one more. However, the life they had created in Portland, though never idyllic, was as close to comfortable as either of my parents would ever see in their married life, with a good job in a small town, decent schools and friends everyone enjoyed. It also gave us the resources to take this vacation every summer. Now, he was leaving this to a very uncertain future, requiring a substantial sacrifice. The family moved away from this life to one of dwindling resources and a rented house in Keeler, Michigan on the edge of a large asparagus field.
After the move, my parents struggled on a meager income and often argued or lived in difficult silence as spouses tend to do when they are resigned to their changed fate. At one point, I remember Mom saying we had qualified for Welfare, but she was determined not to go that route. They did what they could for us, and we still took some great vacations to places like Colorado and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. However, we always rushed out and back, and that combination of youth and unfettered enjoyment that was part of the summer vacation was gone. Separately, they were great parents, however there was never going to be resolution to their relationship and they were to live the rest of their lives in that same house but emotionally divided.
Talking to anyone in my family, they will remember those visits to The Lake with surprising detail. I know I am not alone in the view of what this meant both to me personally and for other members of the family. Those two weeks at The Lake every summer stand out as prime moments in my family’s history. The innocence and eventual realization of it all are almost cliché, but I cannot help but think in those terms. The memories are so vivid, that the mature peeks into my family condition and the importance of this time will always remain.