The Lake Was Open All Day and Nobody Watched the Clock |
A rope swing, a jar with holes punched in the lid, and an uncle who told you to keep your arms straight and then hit the throttle. |
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News for the America we remember |
The humidity got into everything by the end of June. The screen door swelled and stuck. The sheets never quite dried on the line. And the only reasonable response, the only one anybody in that part of the country had ever come up with, was to go get in the water and stay there. |
We were at the lake most of the summer, not because we had money but because we did not. My grandfather had a place there, if you can call it a place: two bedrooms, a porch with a glider that squeaked on every push, and a dock that had been rebuilt so many times it was more nail than board. The water was brown-green and warm on top and shockingly cold about four feet down, and it smelled like weeds and gasoline from the outboards, and I would know that smell today if they bottled it. |
We went in after breakfast and came out for lunch and went back in, and by two in the afternoon your fingertips were white and pruned to the second knuckle and your eyes were pink from the sun. The rope swing was up the shore on the Nagys' side, a hemp rope on a limb that everybody agreed was going to break someday, and that limb outlived the whole generation that worried about it. You ran, you jumped, you let go at the top of the arc, and somebody on the dock timed how long you stayed under. |
At dusk, everything changed over. The heat came off the water in a haze and the swallows came out and then, right at that particular blue hour, the fireflies started up in the field behind the cottages. We had jars. Everybody had a jar. My grandmother punched the lid with an ice pick, four or five holes, and put a little grass in the bottom because we believed the fireflies needed it. They were on the nightstand for one night. In the morning they were dull brown beetles crawling on grass, and that was the disappointment that every kid in America had exactly once before they learned. The water skiing was my uncle Ray's department, and he taught it badly and effectively. You sat in the water in an orange life vest with your knees up against your chest and the tips of the skis out in front of you and the rope handle between them. He would idle out a little, take up the slack, look back once, and then |
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