sloping steering column, he juts his chin towards the still relatively narrow water, and waits.
“No you don’t.” I turn my head and look too, in time to see a man on a dock standing mid-throw, a wound rope uncoiling from his hand towards a woman sitting in a small boat in the process of idling backwards from a launch. “That’s not the lake, not yet it isn’t. You have to sight the actual reservoir.”
“Sure. Make up new rules.” The boy goes back to texting, possibly—I smile to imagine, given his linguistic facility—something akin to: I came, I saw, I died of boredom...
I resist the urge to argue further about the lake, content in the knowledge that from the get-go those were the rules, the same as always they were. The car goes up under a canopy of oaks blocking the sky as the road rises and veers from the water. Over the next few miles the only evidence to indicate the tangible presence of a real lake comes from the wildly varied, hand-lettered signs attached to posts and trees pointing down ever-narrowing access roads disappearing into the surrounding curtain of trees; in places it parts intermittently to show a tantalizing, misleading bit of sky. But finally a deeper, bluer glint of water flickers through the thinning woods and I hear again the excitement and happiness of the boy still residing within me as, triumphantly, I cry out, perhaps a little too loudly: “I see the lake.”
“Okay, Dad. You win.”
“Sorry boy. You snooze, you loose.”
“Big deal,” he says. Indifferent to losing, he nevertheless pauses in his texting. “Who cares? What’s so great about going first anyway?”
“I don’t know.” I admit the fact unreservedly, lightly drumming the hard plastic rim of the steering wheel with my fingers. “Honestly, we never thought to ask.”
The car seems to drive itself down the last long rounding slope containing the shallow backwater opposite the deepest part of the lake held by the dam. I resist the urge to relate the ‘dam facts’ long ago memorized and now silently retrieved—the height and length of the edifice, the billions of gallons it constrains—or explain how the impetus towards rural electrification and economic development led directly to the extinction of two small communities in the basin of the now subsumed creek below us. The summer a major dam overhaul necessitated the reservoir be drawn down and largely voided, I walked among muck-filled but otherwise perfectly recognizable stone foundations of homes abandoned to the formerly rising waters, imagining the lives of those long ago ensconced and contained here. Where did they go? What did they do? Are there any still left who remember?
We approach the little bridge that divides the larger part of the lake to our left from a smaller pond-like enclosure on our right where the marshy mouth of Rush Creek widens into a marina for upwards of a dozen small boats. Dangling from the electric line running parallel to that side of the bridge a congealed metal teardrop, reversing alchemy, reflects leadenly the golden light of the sun. Such bits of strung tackle form a reassuring continuum, yet my mind grapples with every alteration the present world serves up to memory.
The public swimming area—in prior times left always open and accessible—now lies contained behind a chain link fence, beyond our easy reach. I cross the center line of the road, turning off the smooth pavement, easing towards a locked gate on which we find, boldly lettered, a sign bolted against the interwoven wires. Sighing, my son provides the exact timbre of despair as he reads aloud: Absolutely No Swimming Without A Lifeguard!
Not to be deterred, I turn right and follow a rounding yet parallel track to the fence formed by the tires of previous cars, until we find an inconspicuous place to park and don our trunks secretly amid high weeds and grass. But instead of getting out, I sit motionless a moment after removing my shoes, and look beyond the open driver’s side door toward the raft floating high on barrels at the far limit of the roped and buoyed enclosure.
It seems a closer distance to land than I remember, and yet (I conspire with myself to believe) it is, even all these years later, the very same raft off which I learned to jump feet-first, holding both arms tapering overhead, descending through the bubbling vertical vortex of my own plunging. For a second or two, as my released feet rest upon the tire track of freshly compressed earth and grass, I imagine they have finally found the elusive bottom of a remembered dream, and my spine tingles with the charged thrill of confronting the still latent fear that long patient weeds may, even yet, one day reach from the deep to fatally enwrap an ankle and hold me. It is a phobia instilled by the fate met by my great-Aunt Isabelle at the age of eighteen, who jumped from a raft into deep water and failed to resurface, only days before she was to leave home for Ithaca and enroll in a female academy for teachers.
On the dresser of a now spare and unused bedroom, I keep a yellowed picture taken at her high-school commencement. Forever young and chaste, she stands looking off at a slight angle towards the future. Occasionally, all these years later, I still sometimes gaze for a contemplative minute or two on that attractive yet somber visage. Presenting a Victorian bearing, she wears with demure elegance a high-necked chiffon gown; meanwhile, a hank of soft Marcel wave, drawn and pinned into a trailing bouffant, reveals a glint of irrepressibility contained in that statuesque Grecian appearance. Given her young age, she seems needlessly serious. And so, in compensation for what was never to be, sometimes I close my eyes and imagine her smiling.
Over the years I’ve come to surmise it was the awful event that inspired mother’s fear of the water; perhaps at an early age, influenced by a father forever traumatized by the experience—herself traumatized by his sad tale of repeatedly diving, exhausting himself, in a vain attempt to recover his sister—she learned to watch and take care. Despite the fact she always dressed the part, I can’t recall her ever venturing out much beyond dry sand and ankle-deep water during those Sunday afternoons, except for a dim recollection from an early age of her once wading with my brother and me to splash playfully in the shallows.
Another thought occurs to me now, that beyond the likelihood of her own drowning it seems possible—plausible—that she feared more for her boys, and so spent most all her time at the beach like a diligent sentry, avoiding distractions. She neither swam nor strolled any appreciable distance along the shoreline, nor ever read from the succession of books she always brought with her, except during the interval of our eating and the half hour of mandated digesting afterwards.
Told a cautionary tale about the danger of cramps, I interpreted a story of malevolence waiting underwater.
We leave the car and strip behind it. The boy turns shyly away, exposing the pearly white purity of his bare bottom. Safe from view, I enjoy the transitory thrill of standing naked in the world. Before slipping my trunks on, I look beyond the far side of the wired enclosure, remembering a place, now possessed by a cottage, where my father and mother and brother and I once long ago camped in a trailer.
As we approach the gate again, I look beyond it, down the length of interlinked wire, towards the dwindling end of beach where my father always set the barbecue grill, away from children carelessly splashing about in the water. I close my eyes and imagine him still standing there on a sandy crescent of shoreline, enclosed by the now becalmed water and a green profusion of cattails.
A cool draft coming off the lake causes me to wonder if we have come too late. The possibility prompts the remembrance of another past summer day when the water proved too cold to go in. As I stood with my toes at the waterline looking out, a tall gangly girl my own age, with skin of shiny ebony and hair kinky black, approached holding in both hands a half-empty bottle of Fresca. Having little experience with unfamiliar girls, even less with black ones, I found her an interesting challenge. My eyes continually drew away from her face to her hair, woven into pigtails tied off at the ends with bits of red yarn. I particularly liked the way she talked, which imparted a slight trill to the words she spoke. But my every gambit to capture her interest failed until, replying, “Tosh,” to a bold hypothetical I expressed in an attempt to impress
her, (that swimming would be far more comfortable if a small piece of sun were to only fall in the lake and warm it,) she turned away and went back to sit on the blanket next to her mother, who listened, smiling, holding a cigarette motionless to her lips, as between finishing sips on her Fresca the girl related what I’d said.
Pausing together, the boy and I seem to briefly consider passing around the end of the fence in order to go the most direct route through the high rushes, but the path there is unappealingly mucky; so in the next moment we turn wordlessly and cross the road to the sheltered inlet harboring a half dozen small motorboats, approaching the exact place pointed to by the plumb-bob lure strung in the wires overhead.
The water chills my bare legs as it rises, creeping into my trunks; extending both arms, crossing one hand over the other, I hold my breath and plunge in. For awhile we swim contentedly in small circles, adapting to the depth of this secluded estuary until, searching for greater adventure, we go under the bridge. The light immediately changes, comes at a low angle towards us, so that crisscrossing waves of disturbance reflect on the overarching concrete. When behind me the boy