Environmental Autobiography, Part II

Driving out to Whitewater Lake was always an adventure, and I remember being acutely aware of the changing scenery that flowed past the car windows – dense suburban housing that eventually began spreading out, then rather quickly transforming into countryside. (I know that drive like the back of my hand, and could have directed you there long before I could legally drive there.) The house sat along a road on a ridge that bisects the lake, coincidentally called Ridge Road, and you have to take a rather winding trip up and down, left and right, in order to get there.

We visited basically every other week, not always precisely but it seemed to work out that way, through every kind of weather and each turn of the season. I remember how loud the screen door would slam if you weren’t gentle – which we rarely were – and gouging my knee on the weird concrete steps smack in the middle of the yard. (I still have the scar.) I remember the smell of freshly-mown grass, having been allowed to wield a push-mower from an early age, but especially the smell of burning leaves, which we would first rake into large piles and dive into before letting Dad loose with the lighter fluid. I remember the sound of the motorboats, but especially the sound after the motorboats fell silent, the sound of the lake making the sounds it’s always made, will always make.

Whitewater Lake was the place where I first lit smoke bombs, the place where I shot a rifle for the one and only time. (I closed my eyes and was physically thrown backwards by the recoil, but I somehow hit the can.) But what was the house to me? Was it just a place to sleep, a place to seek shelter from inclement weather – or was there more to it, how it exuded warmth from the moment you opened the door to the kitchen in subzero weather and smelled the apple cake that Aunt Lee had warm from the oven without fail each and every time you came to visit? How it freaked you a little bit to take a shower in the basement, in a dark corner without so much as a light bulb, with the cobwebs and the spiders and who knows what else? How in the winter you would access the basement through the hatch in the floor because there’s no way you’re going out in three feet of snow in your bathrobe, thank you very much.

I would spend several weeks each summer out at Aunt Lee’s by myself, bookended by visits from my family to drop me off and pick me back up. I’d work in the yard, mow the lawn, scrape and paint parts of the house that were peeling – anything she needed, because that’s why I was out there. I was there to have fun, of course, but I was really there for her – at least that’s how my nine-year-old self thought. Lying in the hammock drinking Dr. Pepper out of glass bottles. Catching butterflies in a net and letting them fly away. Fishing off the pier, but only when Aunt Lee was around – because if I caught anything, I would need her to take the fish off the hook. (To this day, I can’t touch a live fish.) It was those weeks where I learned how to appreciate simple things.