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Life Growing Up On Chautauqua Lake

To grow up on this lake means to understand the seasons, to watch the colors change from bright and uplifting blues to the dark, army greens. Chautauqua Lake is lightest in the cold months and darkest in summer when the water is cool and dark like old green beach glass. Sometimes it is so clear you can see the bass milling in the water under the docks or note a pod of pointed nose pike 6 feet below you if you are anchored in the deep waters off Long Point. It’s like going to church. There’s something spiritual about this place.

To grow up here means to understand that beauty and death sometimes go hand-in-hand, that water so peaceful and lovely can also be treacherous. We all know someone whose life ended in these waters in the dead of winter under the ice or in brilliant summer in some quick and strange accident of fate. We look on the lake with awe and appreciation, but we never, ever, take it for granted or regard it lightly. It’s a beautiful lake, benevolent and gracious most of the time; dangerous and foreboding sometimes too. We who grew up on its shores never forget that.

To grow up on Chautauqua Lake means to know well the way the wind howls on a January night when the house quakes and seems to protest, groaning in the cold. We all know the peculiar way the cold ekes through the unglazed windows and the metallic smell of ice on an indoor pane, how you can etch it with your fingernail, how you can stand there looking out at the white world beyond on days when the whole lake is white, the whole world is white. At such times we too seem frozen in the moment. But we know that March will come and the ice will melt, then dock by dock, summer will come again.

Though it has been more than 50 years since, I often think of the spring day our friend Darby skied Bemus Bay when the ice had just barely melted early that year. Ice blocks still floated in the Bay that day. I remember a summer afternoon at Midway Park when my old friend Bill stepped off his docked boat, looking tan and fit, shining in the sun; I always think of him exactly that way. I think of my cousins Barb and Martha and I seated on the wooden dock at Fluvanna, dangling our feet in the water. I see my cousin Larry at the helm of his handsome boat, speeding us across the waves to church on a summer’s day. Our hair is blown back and our faces wet and full of light.

I remember my grandfather Carl backing up his car and trailer down the concrete boat ramp by his dock in October, pulling up his fishing boat, hauling it up the hill to the refuge of the big garage for winter. He was always wistful on those days. I see my grandmother Johnson baiting her hook, sitting in her dress, high heels and hat, fishing off a dock in Fluvanna. I think of my neighbor in Bemus who, ice fishing on a frigid day, was swept away and found later miles down the lake. I see my sister Vicky standing with Grandpa Forsberg and the Muskie they caught. I remember my father in hearty middle age swimming the crawl or in his shaky old age, standing on his dock in Sunset Bay, looking across the lake to Chautauqua Institution and the hills of Harmony beyond where he was born. These images are always with me.

When I was 16 and 17 I spent long summer days with a boy named Rob who would one day father my sons and become my husband. Tall and blond, Rob had a sleek mahogany Chris Craft with two inboard engines that purred like mighty lions. On days like this in late July dressed in our water clothes, we would set off from his T-shaped dock in Bemus Bay headed for the freedom of the northern lake. Often, we anchored at Long Point, and dove off the boat into dark water soft like ribbons of cold. We would dive deep, looking for pike, muskie, catfish – all dwellers of the dim lower realms – and find them there in their tight circle communities living in the shaded cool of a seemingly bottomless cove. They were shocked to see us. It made us smile. We would clamber back into the boat and lie for hours, drying and tanning in the sun, the lake breeze its own soft towel.

Sometimes Rob would water ski. He was a powerful skier, and like our friend Darby could ski on one ski or barefoot with singular grace. It always took my breath away to see him leaning back fearlessly, bending and slipping so fast across the wake back and forth in a perilous beautiful zig zag. I envied that skill. I still do. I envy the moxie of it. I can feel the exhilaration from 50 years away – the sun painting our faces, the wind wild in our hair.

So the lake gives us refuge; it takes us back to our youth.

Last Sunday, after a weekend memorial service for their grandmother and great grandmother, my son, Brennan and his two little ones went swimming at Long Point. They had lost so much in the last few months – a mother, two grandmothers, a life they had known. Beyond them lay Warner Bay, Sunset Bay, the water just as I recalled it army green, clear and dark and cold as artesian springs. It was a baptism of sorts, a cleansing, a rejuvenation. We have all endured such losses, our own particular losses. The lake stretches out powerful and beautiful amidst the Chautauqua hills. Sometimes it feels like church just to look at it.

I looked at my family and at that lake and realized that all my life I have measured my life in seasons spent on that lake. All my life I have looked up the long sleek lake to count my days on earth, to measure the time of my life and the eras of it from youth to age. And so it is in life – in autumn, we rue and reflect; in winters we endure; in spring we hope and dream; and in summers we renew and rejoice.

To grow up here, to live here, means to understand seasons and all they represent. There’s something fine and wondrous in this county, something mystical about the green hills and this ancient lake, something spiritual. I am drawn here and drawn back here ever and again. It’s the existential painting in my heart.

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