With another Lake Geneva summer already underway, I thought a nice refresher on piers would be nice. Enjoy your Sunday, which is an impossibility if you’re not at Lake Geneva right now…
His comment was innocent enough. My brother in law, basking in the life changing power of his first Lake Geneva boat ride, made a comment that made me cringe. I probably threw in a head shake and a condescending look in conjunction with the cringe. After passing pier after white pier, like a child asking why you don’t put metal in a microwave, he asked me why we don’t use synthetic decking on the piers. He reasoned that synthetic decking would last longer, require minimal maintenance, and dry out faster after a heavy rain. Like a parent addressing the microwave question, I answered him in the simplest way I could imagine when I plainly replied, “just because”.
Last week, I was out on the boat again (go figure), this time treating a friend and his out of town relative to one of my famous boat rides (a ride by the way that you can have any time you wish if you’d only ask), and this relative, a New Yorker none the less, gathered up the energy to ask me another pier related question. He was confused by the piers. He didn’t understand why we’d build them out of wood. He figured steel would be more permanent, more stable. He asked me why we didn’t use steel, and why we wouldn’t (I’m not kidding here) build deck structures on top of the canopy areas. You know, for partying and stuff. I assured him we’re not interested in his efforts at saving the steel industry, and we’re certainly not going to have party decks made of the same on top of our piers. I told him it would be a sin. It would be garish. I again fashioned my face in a condescending manner and questioned his moral fiber for suggesting that I replace my prized white piers with steel party platforms.
And so it was, a couple of weeks spent on the water, and a couple of unnerving suggestions as to how to improve the piers on Geneva Lake. For the record, they are piers, not docks. If you hear someone here call a pier a dock, you’ve uncovered their insincerity. It’s a pier, not a dock. What’s the difference? A dock has metal posts, usually about 3 inches in diameter, with old tires hugging those posts to serve as boat bumpers. Nothing says dock like some Goodyear’s and a boat with black smudges on the sides from the continual rub.
Presumably, piers are white so they can be seen better by boaters. Black piers don’t show up so well at night, and then there’s that classic boating line that was aimed at boats but I’ll apply to piers as well. “There are only two colors to paint a boat, black or white. And only an idiot paints a boat black”. White piers are classic, and Geneva is a classic lake. I was showing some homes yesterday on Delavan lake and one of the piers had a natural colored deck board. I shook my head in pity for the homeowner who clearly needs some help understanding classic lake design. Even Delavan needs white piers, and thankfully, 98% of piers on that lake are classically white as well.
The piers are white, and they are indeed captivating. I’m the type of guy that usually cannot find peace doing things that typically might bring calm to normal people. If I’m driving by a golf course with golfers in full swing, it looks so serene to me. So beautiful, and so restful. It looks like something I really, really want to do. Yet, although I love golf, I find it a grind, I find it frustrating, I find it competitive and stressful. I love it, but it almost always looks better through my eyes when someone else is doing it. Several things in my life are like that, usually leisure activities that just look like they’d be fun but aren’t. Sitting on a white pier on Geneva reading a magazine while my kids practice their “dives” isn’t one of them. That event, whether set on a brilliant white pier, or an aging white pier with peeling paint, is always ideal for me. It’s always something restful. Always peaceful. Never disappointing.
So for the past 100 years, for now, and hopefully long after I’m gone, the piers on Geneva will be white. They’ll have canvas covering the boat slip, and that canvas may or may not be striped. In my ideal world, give me some stripes. They’ll be called piers, and they’ll be the setting of both relaxing after dinner drinks, and afternoon swimming parties. They’ll be the structures that generations of children learn to swim off of, practice dives from, and play rag tag in and around (that’s another post). The best thing about a classic white pier on Geneva is that you can buy one. You can buy a lakefront home for $2MM and have your very own white pier, or you can spend $250k and belong to an association with a shared white pier. Either way, the pier will be white. It’ll be classic. And it’ll be something I’ll always love.