I could never live in a small condo in the city. My brother does this, the city living in the small condo. I don’t really know how he does it either, what with his childhood spent at the lake, which isn’t in the country if you’re from the lake, but if you’re from a small condo in the city it sure is. He lives in a small space, with hundreds of neighbors above and below him, and on the sides, too. The only walls that aren’t common are the ones that face the outside, that face the lake and the park and the city. Those windows are the view that saves that small place, but the living is tight, the hallways narrow, the ceilings somewhat low.
Even at most lakes, it’s tight, too. The lots are tight, the views are narrow, the lots restricted. If you have a weekend house on Any Lake, USA, that’s nice. It probably has a nice lawn, with a metal dock, and a fire pit where you burn sticks, sure, but also the cardboard. If you wish to see the lake, you can jump on your pontoon boat, and float past the weedy shallows, where the reeds crowd and the mill foil creeps, and you can push to deeper water for a ride. You’ll spin around that lake in no time flat, and you’ll return to your narrow lawn. The fire pit is still smoldering, so that’s good.
You can walk to one edge of your lawn, and survey the neighbors property. He has a nice metal dock, too, and his fire pit is sort of like yours except he uses an old oil barrel that his brother cut in half with a torch from his work. It only smelled like oil and fuel for a few weeks, and now it’s just a rusty ring that he burns his trash in, but also some sticks now and again. You can walk to the other side or your lot, looking over that other neighbor’s lawn. His lawn is nicer than yours, and his pier is as well. He doesn’t have a fire pit, because he checked with the township and they told him that it wasn’t allowed. He’s so naive.
This is the extent of your lakeside exploration at this lake. You can walk your property, and look after its edges. You can get in your boat, and ply those green waters. Or, you can go for a walk, the one your wife likes to take, and it’ll force you to follow the roads around and around. The roads are fine, they really are, but they’re dangerous because people rarely follow the speed limit in those parts. It doesn’t matter if they’re safe or not, as they are your only walking option. At this house, on this lake, when you walk and you boat and you sit on your front lawn around the smoky fire pit, you don’t feel particularly trapped.
You don’t feel trapped simply because you don’t know better. You don’t know what a shore path is like. In fact, you don’t understand the concept at all. It would be okay for your neighbor to walk into your front lawn, so long as you were out in that lawn and you were talking about the level of the lake or the other neighbor’s naivete. But you wouldn’t walk through his lakeside lawn and onto the next, and so on and so forth until you ringed the lake. You couldn’t, anyway, because of the fences and the BEWARE OF DOG signs that may or may not be telling any particular truth. The shore path that would allow you to do this isn’t something anyone feels comfortable with, so you’ll just be forced to find contentment in your hemmed in weekend.
It dawned on me yesterday, as I sat lakeside watching the day unfold, that the shore path remains something of utmost importance, but at the same time remains completely and entirely taken for granted. What if we couldn’t get around in this manner? What if, when my family decided to walk to Pier 290 yesterday for lunch, we had to walk away from the lake, up the hills and down the roads and into the parking lot? It sure was a whole lot nicer to walk down a cobbled path of stone and grass, with the lake always at our right, until the way home when it was at our left. When we sat at those fine tables and ate the so-so food in that glorious setting, the lake was never out of view.
When I sell homes here, or at least when I try to, I’m sure to mention the shore path. I can see buyers struggle to understand the importance of it, and instead, just shrug it off as an oddity of the market. I wish this wouldn’t be the case. The shore path is pure magic, and without it we’d all be tucked into our little plots without any freedom to roam.
Amen