Environmental Autobiography, Part III

But then I grew up. As I got into high school, I stopped spending summer weeks out at Whitewater Lake – I had a job, for one, and other things going on. We would still make our trips out to see Aunt Lee, but my sister and I might not go every time. Then I went off to college in Northfield, MN and moved to Minneapolis after graduating, the second and third places on the itinerary of my life so far. Aunt Lee died in December of the year I graduated - she was 88 years old and still occasionally babysitting for neighboring families. I don’t remember how I felt on the day I first went back to her house after she was gone, and I think this is probably for the best – I’d much rather remember the house with her in it. My parents inherited the cottage, and continued to go on at least a monthly basis – and every weekend in the summer -  just like Aunt Lee would have wanted it, I’m sure.

Eventually, it was my turn. In 1996 I got an offer from some friends who had been subletting an apartment in Brooklyn to move out to New York and share an apartment with them. It was an offer too good to refuse, but before the new lease would start I’d have almost three months to kill and I needed to be out of my Minneapolis place. Enter Whitewater Lake, where I lived for April, May and June of that year on my eventual way out to NYC. But where my experiences for the previous twenty-plus years had been nearly idyllic, my time spent actually living on Whitewater Lake was incredibly different. While I had the same free time to sit and relax and enjoy, the lake and the house especially felt increasingly like a prison. It was small, and the television reception was horrible. I had been living with no fewer than three other people for the previous four years, and I was missing daily interactions with friends. The uncertainty I was feeling about moving away had infiltrated my relationship with my environment in a big, bad way.

Sometimes it’s hard being surrounded by silence when all you want to do is scream.

It didn’t help that the sun came out from behind the clouds maybe fifteen or twenty of the ninety days I lived there, or at least it seemed that way. Summer was late in coming that year, so even the trees were mainly dormant for most of those months, adding to the increasing sense of expectation (and anxiety) that was swirling through my mind - until summer finally exploded in late May. Here’s a photograph taken later that June, near the end of my time living on Whitewater Lake. What’s not nearly perfect about this picture? My shadow is the only thing that’s giving away how I really feel, though in that kind of setting sunlight you’d be hard-pressed to have a care in the world.