Lake Clarity

When I was a kid, we never had a "lake house" that we went to every summer for a month, like all the kids in the young adult stories, where I got brown and wore flip-flops and ate ice cream with other brown, tan, be-flip-flopped kids. The closest we had was my grandfather's cottage in Massachusetts, which is on a lake, but since he technically lived in a completely different country from me (to wit: the United States), we didn't really go there for very long. I have pictures of me jumping in the lake with some other kids, and my grandfather swears he remembers me playing cowboys with my cousin Isak, but I don't really have lake-related memories.

Justin, on the other hand, is rife with lake-related memories, because he grew up going to The Lake, aka Clear Lake, aka the Murkiest Lake I Have Ever Seen. It looks remarkably like Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, what with the lazily brown mountains and sort of haphazard trees and speedboats zipping all over the place, but it differs in several major senses: a) it is not in Guatemala, b) everyone who lives here is richer by approximately 47 times than everyone who lives on Lake Atitlan, where you can purchase a vacation home for the equivalent of $300 US (yes, there is not a missing set of three zeroes from that number), and c) people go SCUBA diving in Lake Atitlan. If they went in Clear Lake, they would see nothing, until someone riding a WaveBlaster tore their heads off. Then they really wouldn't see anything.

So we got here yesterday and have been spending the days doing what most people do at the lake, apparently, which is snack and lounge, sometimes both simultaneously, sometimes on a boat. We are frequently on a boat, which means we are all incessantly singing about being on a boat. I drove the boat, both yesterday and today. And I ate a lot of snacks, both yesterday and today. I would nap more, but the beds are very uncomfortable.

I also rode a WaveBlaster today, which is the kind of water device that people like to complain make too much noise and go too fast. I can vouch that they do, in fact, do both. Despite us making some truly impressive sharp turns across the wakes of larger boats, and becoming totally airborne on several occasions, Justin pointed out some valuable reassurance. 'It's pretty hard to hurt yourself on one of these," he said. "We've tried."

I think it's more likely I'll hurt myself with eating too much, until my stomach falls off, which is what I'm doing right now.