"The Lake"

  Have you ever noticed that when people say “I’m going to the lake,” they very rarely say the name of the lake...?  It’s usually just “the lake,” as if everyone in the whole world knows exactly which lake they are talking about...?

My thinking is that people don’t say the name of the lake because the name just doesn’t matter.  What does matter is that you are one of the lucky people who get to go to “the lake.” 

I have always enjoyed being in the water whether it’s a lake, a pool, the ocean, the river, or even, according to my mother, the pond in our pasture where the pigs used to cool off!  That list used to include mud puddles too, of course.

There’s  special something about being in the water as the sun comes from overhead, warming you at the same time that the water is cooling you.  It’s kind of like a “Baked Alaska” dessert, where the cake on the outside is warm, but the ice cream in the middle is still cool.

                                                          

 I made a "baked Alaska" many years ago.  The trick is that you put a meringue on the outside of both the cake and the ice cream, sealing the ice cream from melting on the inside.  Just the name of this desert is cool-sounding, isn't it?!  (No pun intended!)

 

 When I’m floating in the water, that weightlessness that I feel in my body seems to make its way inside my head, helping me to unload some of the weight and worries of the world.

I grew up on a small-town farm in North Dakota, in the very Southeast corner - 8 miles from the South Dakota border and 15 miles from the Minnesota border.  However, even though, we were only 15 miles from the "land of 10,000 lakes", we did not have the luxury of all those lakes anywhere near us.  But – we did have one – and that was all we needed!  “Our” lake was Lake Elsie.

We went to lake Elsie most Sundays after church.  Mom always made us wait until a lunch had been packed.  We always complained, saying that we didn’t need lunch, that we just wanted to get going to go swimming. Thank goodness we never won that battle!  After a few hours of swimming, we were so very happy that the time had been taken, (precious time that we could have been swimming), to pack that lunch. 

To this day, I still don’t think that the simple lunch of a juicy hot dog, salty potato chips and fruity kool-aid has ever tasted as good as it used to when we were at Lake Elsie.

Lake Elsie was about 15 miles West from our farm.  As an adult, 15 miles usually isn’t very far.  As a child, on a hot summer day, eager to get in the water to cool off and play, it was a very long distance.  It seemed to take forever to get there.  We knew that we were finally getting close when we saw the "hill" that seemed to magically appear out of nowhere before the lake came into view. 

Since we all know that most of North Dakota is pretty darn flat, I know now that it was closer to a big bump in the road than a hill, but since we knew that the lake was on the other side of it, it seemed so much bigger to my siblings and I at the time.

My family was very large, so we usually drove two vehicles to the lake.  Mom always drove one and if Dad wasn’t driving the other one, one of my older siblings drove.  We usually took one of the cars and a pick-up truck.  My favorite vehicle to ride in was the pick-up.  I loved it when the wind blew through my hair and it was fun to have to scream at my brothers and sisters to be heard. 

 

                                     

This is a picture of a little over "half" of us.  It happened to be a time when both Mom and Dad were there, which was pretty infrequent.  My brother Bruce ( holding the little blonde girl behind the pickup) and my sister Barbara (holding the little blonde boy in front of the pickup), as well as Mom and Dad are no longer with us, as all four of them passed away between 2001 and 2011).

 We were pretty crammed in the pickup because we always squeezed some big inner tubes in with us.  And mind you - these inner tubes weren’t the sissy little pink barney floaties or the bright school bus-yellow that we fit around our kids’ waists today!  The tubes that we used were the huge black ones from the inside of the tractor wheels.  We could fit several of us on one tube and it was big enough for a few of us to stand on and try to push the others off.  Since it was black, the tube attracted the sun and would almost burn your hand if you didn’t frequently splash water on the tube to keep it cooled off.  (And you also had to watch out for that thing that poked out of the tire where the air went in!)

 

 

                                 

 

 The sand at Lake Elsie wasn’t even close to some of the fine, white European sands I’ve seen since my Lake Elsie days, but it more than served its purpose for making sand castles and covering each other up from head to toe with it.  And little did we know that the sand was anything less than perfect.

 

      After the sun had started to set and the day had cooled off, it was time to pack up and head home.  We almost always stopped for an ice cream cone in the town next to the lake.  That meant that we were eating that ice cream cone in an open vehicle going about 70 miles an hour down the road.  I remember hunckering down to try and save my ice cream from being blown out of the cone.

I had very long and thick hair growing up and I wasn’t very good about keeping it in a pony tail, so you can probably imagine that between the wet hair, the wind and the ice cream, it wasn’t a pretty picture when we got home.  But I wasn’t alone.  My sisters Sharon and Faye shared the same fate. 

After we got home, the rest of Sunday night was mostly consumed with baths and trying to comb through our hair.

I was about 11 or 12 years old when my uncle LeRoy drowned in Lake Elsie.  After that, we didn’t go the Lake nearly as often.  I don’t know if my Dad felt that it was disrespectful of his memory or if I just always thought that was the reason that we went less often. I just remember that the trips to the lake were far less frequent after my Uncle’s death.

About 15 years ago, I went back to Lake Elsie with my husband and three small children for a birthday party that we were having for my Dad at a restaurant by the lake.

When I looked at the lake that day as the sun was setting, it looked so dingy and dirty and there were a couple of dead fish on the shoreline.  I don’t know if the lake had changed that much over the years or if it just looked different because I was seeing it through adult eyes.

 I would like to think that if it had been a little warmer that day and if I had brought my swim suit with, or even had a pair of shorts and a t-shirt with me, that I still would have jumped in and went swimming.

Being at “The Lake” is still my favorite place in the world to be.  Even when it’s too cold to go swimming, I still enjoy being there.  There’s something calm and relaxing about the water that draws me to it. 

Maybe part of the allure is psychological.  Since going to Lake Elsie was easily my favorite childhood memory, maybe one of the reasons I love spending time by the water is because of all the good memories I have of me and my family there.  My siblings and I actually had a lot of chores growing up on the farm and like anyone with siblings, we did our share of fighting with each other.

But while we were at Lake Elsie, our only job was to enjoy ourselves and along with that, came enjoying the company of those around you.

And as I still continue to think to this day, as I am floating in the cool waters with the sun shining down on me, “life just doesn’t get any better than this.”