I know, if the trees outside the east window of my bedroom are leaning or swaying away from that casement window, that the waters on the east side of Conference Point will be still. I know this from experience and from practice, and I know this from select mornings where my dawn comes before yours and the first rusty pulls on a stern drive outboard test my tender rotator cuff while in the still of a lifting fog. I know, when the west wind blows, that the western tip of Cedar Point will be too chopped to hold an anchor, and that a steely trial into the teeth of that wind will reward with calm water at Uhleins Creek. If I can anchor to the west of the stream, just off the tip of the first pier, then the early wind will stretch my anchor line taut without even rippling the surface of the water.
And if Uhleins doesn’t hold any fish, either because the fish are elsewhere or because my patience will not endure 11 minutes, I know that I might motor south to the lee side of Rainbow Point and find peaceful water if I stay within an imaginary line drawn from that point towards the Black Point in the distance.
But these are spots I know, on a lake that I know better than most know their squared backyards. When the wind blows, familiarity isn’t a requirement when scouting for the calm bays and still waters. I can stand in Williams Bay with Conference and Cedar Points framing my gaze and look south, and I know and understand the water that I see. I can do the same in Fontana, and look to the east as far as the shoreline allows, and know without pause what it is I’m viewing. But when I stand in Lake Geneva and look to the south, past Maytag Point and south to a property that I once spent a night in as a teenager, I recognize the water, but I don’t know it. To say that I do would be nothing less than a lie. That eastern water is more like a photograph of a cousin I’ve been around all of my life: I recognize the image and know the generalities of faux familiarity- roughly his year of birth, generally his personality and his occupation, but I do not know him. To say I do would be a mistake, and it would assume there’s nothing more to know than the approximates of what I have already learned.
My line of familiarity isn’t clearly demarcated, it isn’t black and white, as I know certain swaths of water even beyond the barrier that draws a clear line down Chapin road and south to Wooddale and thus defines my east and west, my known and mostly unknown. I know what I will find if I anchor in 8 feet of water just to the West of the boulder bay that spans the edge of Mr. Wrigley Jr’s fine estate. If I let the anchor down quietly, and if the breeze is blowing from any direction, and if I don a scuba mask, I know that I can dive to where the anchor drags along the sandy bottom and watch smallmouth bass eat the crayfish that dodge the anchor’s path. I can watch these fish, as they watch the anchor, and I can be happy doing so. I also know that if I wanted, which I usually do, I can stand on the bow and cast a jig into the cloud that the anchor creates and catch those smallmouth.
And if I glide south, to the weedy bay tucked east of the Lake Geneva Country Club’s golf course, I know that early mornings will allow me to throw a spinner bait through the only spot on the lake where lily pads thrive. If I cast and retrieve and cast and retrieve, slowly, then quickly, and slow again until I find the speed that lights the largemouth’s candle ablaze, there will be success sooner or later. But this is where my eastern end education begins and ends. I know little of the lake here. I can see it, and smell it, and know that it’s the same lake filled with the same water, but it feels different. It feels unexplored, at least to me. It is my wild west, and it just so happens to be on the east end of my seven mile lake.
I grew up gripping the plastic steering wheel of a 16′ Boston Whaler Montauk, a boat with a center console made of mahogany or oak, and Whaler’s signature powder blue interior. It was a classic boat, even if the classic nature of it did require the continual tightening of the screws that kept the console more or less attached to the hull. It was a great boat. It was the boat I drove to Mel Hansen’s gas pump, and once after pumping gas discovered that I hadn’t brought any money with. It was the boat that I’d fish out of in high school, the boat that I almost crashed into the sand beach of Strawberry Lake. It was a fun boat, but it was not a boat that routinely ventured beyond the eastern tip of Cedar Point, a defined perimeter either owed to a lack of curiosity or a light tank of gas. It was a west end boat, perfect for a west end kid. The east end was mysterious to me then, and some 16 or 18 years later, it remains my own personal frontier.
And so this summer, I will explore the unexplored, and I will fish and boat and swim in the east end. I will fish the lily pads at the Lake Geneva Country Club, and I will drag jigs over Wrigley’s boulder bay. I will dive and watch the smallmouth eat their crayfish, and I will feel young. But I will also troll in front of Trinke’s lagoon and figure out if the drops at Maytag Point are as prominent as they are at Black Point. I will enter summer with the goal of one day looking at Geneva Bay as I would Fontana Bay, or Williams Bay. I will ultimately discover the end of a lake that I have long pretended to know.
(photo courtesy Matt Mason Photography. Matt is a Lake Geneva photographer.)