Memories That Smell Lakey

The smell of the lake is hard to describe. It permeates the air the minute you step from the car, thick and moist, fresh and murky. Lakey, for lack of a better word. A sense of anticipation grows as we drive through the tunnel of cottages: a long, green canopy of drifting leaves, rows of small, picturesque houses lining either side. We are almost there, transported to what feels like another realm, away from real life. With that first breath, deep and bracing, something down inside me settles, content, at peace. This is the place where a hundred happy memories eclipse the few dark ones also grown here. This place is my childhood, my home. 

Lake Elizabeth isn’t on many maps. The Twin Lakes community is often swallowed up by the bigger Lake Geneva, a tourist town just down the street, or Fox Lake, one of the larger bodies of water on the Wisconsin-Illinois border. Of the obligatory two lakes in Twin Lakes, Wisconsin, Elizabeth is the smaller still, with Lake Mary getting all the shops, Fourth of July fireworks, and the Aquanauts. This is where, when I was a baby, my grandparents decided to build a house. Boating has been in the family for generations, and as such, it made sense they would have a lake house, maybe a minute and a half walk from the marina.  

The cottage - as we affectionately, if uncreatively, called it - was the setting of all my formative summers. From a very early age, I could recognize the peeling blue and white paint, the knotted trees lining the approaching road, the long, black driveway leading to a separate gray garage on sight. I memorized the route from the highway to the screen room door that always whined when it opened and slammed shut, despite my gramma always yelling not to slam the door. I learned to watch for greenish-black goose poop while walking with my grandpa across the white graveled marina every morning to see the lake, staring silently at the water as if it might change in the intervening hours of night and years between visits. At night, I would catch lightning bugs with our neighbor’s granddaughter, Janie. Then my twin sister and I would sleep on the floor of the forest themed guest room in our little, red sleeping bags, the pair of twin beds reserved for my parents. In the morning we would listen at the door in the nearly pre-dawn hours, waiting to hear our grandpa clear his smokers’ lungs of phlegmy buildup. That cough was our indication that someone else was awake and we were allowed to get up. Those were the little things that marked each summer.  

One of the things I remember best about the lake is learning to water ski. Since birth, my sister and I were fans of the water. We learned to swim when we were two. We spent every day at the cottage either on our grandpa’s boat or down at the little swim beach five minutes away from the house. You had to walk past the big brown house with the decorative monarch butterfly on the gabled roof. Everyone in our family could water ski, so when we turned three, it was high time we learned too. My mom borrowed a pair of tiny training water skis from another neighbor and friend, Bob, who had a granddaughter a year or so older than me.  

At first, I hated learning. While I loved swimming, being towed behind a boat with nothing but a few flimsy pieces of wood to hold me up scared me to death. It required patience and skills that things like tubing and ‘driving’ the boat just didn’t ask of me. Plus, I had an irrational fear of fish and something about floating motionless in the water, waiting to get going, seemed attractive to fish, at least in my mind. While swimming, I was moving enough to scare off the fish, or else enough to distract myself from the thought fish could be nearby. But just sitting made me feel too much like a giant lure. So each time it was my turn to practice, I cried and whined about not wanting to, my pleas falling on my mom and grandpa’s deaf ears.  

“Stop being a baby and just get in already,” my mom would say. I’d shake my head vehemently, claiming I didn’t want to learn anymore. 

“Yes, you do,” she argued. “You’ve always wanted to. Just like the Aquanauts.” 

“You just have to give it a try,” Grandpa added. “Get in and show us what a big girl you are.” And despite my wobbling lip and red eyes, I let my mom buckle me into a life jacket and dangle me over the ski deck to put on the skis.  

They knew that once I got it, I’d love it. And deep down, I did want to learn, even if the gift of my own pair of training skis for my birthday filled me with dread rather than excitement. But eventually, I grew tired of being dragged on my face, water flying up my nose and lake muck up my swim suit bottoms. I strained against the water as hard as my little legs could, and then I was standing.  

“I’m up, I’m up!” I screeched. Mist sprayed in my face and I had a wedgie, but I was upright. I could hear distant cheers over the sound of the motor. I let go of the rope with one hand to wave in triumph. And promptly fell on my grinning face. Not much has changed since then.  

Some things are so distinctly ‘the cottage’ that my mind simply can’t go anywhere else when I think of them. Water skiing is one. Another is fireworks. Every Fourth of July when we still lived in the Midwest, my mom and uncle would put down a few hundred dollars on semi-illegal pyrotechnics and set them off in the cottage’s spacious back yard. I loved tracking a mortar or roman candle as it shot off the spindly launch post, leaving a sparking trail and high pitched zip before exploding high above and thundering in my chest. One year, a contest arose between us and the neighbors on the corner, who could set off the most spectacular display. By then end of the night, the air was so smoky you couldn’t see across the street. At that point, we decided to take a break. Only so many beers and friendly chats would keep the cops that rolled by now and again placated.  

It is the same with fishing, red Arrivas with big black outboard motors, snowmobiles, raccoons, squishy purple berries, mosquito bites, and fireplaces. Each transports me back to the same place. Suddenly I am watching my grandpa point out the tiny, black-red heart of a fish as he fillets it. I am sunbathing on the bow of Old Speedy. I’m falling asleep on a snowmobile, despite the loud rumbling and perfect smell of gasoline, as we trundle down freezing back trails. I’m watching a raccoon the size of a dog steel marshmallows under the cover of darkness. I’m picking the berries from the huge tree out back, my feet stained purple for three days afterward. I’m counting the rapidly swelling welts on my back (my top being thirty), realizing I am quite allergic as one on my leg encompasses my entire calf. I am curling up in a cocoon of quilts in front of the fire, waiting for this one source of heat to warm the entire house.    

These and a million more memories and recollections, warm my mind as I purposely let the screen door slam one last time, my eyes wet and throat tight. Finally, after twenty-three years, as many as I've been alive, I have to let this foundation of my childhood go. No more care-free summers on the late, though we haven't actually spent one up here since I was a kid. No more Fourth fireworks, or lightning bugs, or skiing, or that sweet lakey smell. I might even miss the mosquitoes, Wisconsin's tongue in cheek "state bird". Of course, I'll still experience these things. But they won't be the same once my grandparents move to Florida for good, selling off the cottage with so many of my memories still infused in its walls. I feel as if I am loosing a long-time friend, someone who's always been there.

That’s what the cottage is. A jumble of good memories to sustain me into the present and make me forget all the bad ones. Childhood is like that. You hang on to the sunny days and the fun, leaving the darker times to linger in the back of your memory. Even when I visit now, my mind still goes back to those initial experiences. My identity now is built from this place. I still love the smell of gasoline and the rush of adrenaline when I am running away from a lit explosive. I’m still cocky, trying to water ski with no hands or stand up on a moving tube. I’m still deathly afraid of fish even though I know it’s a silly fear, particularly when I love the lake so much. It is my home. It is life when it was simple, when it was good.