Boating in the summer isn’t very difficult. Neither is walking down the shore path in the morning in whichever direction offers you coffee. Sitting in a lawn chair, watching the boats and the waves and the gulls; super easy. Driving to the corn stand on a Saturday afternoon is a cinch, as anyone with a car and a license and six dollars can make it to the stand and leave with a dozen golden ears. Waking on a Sunday morning early to fish or to ski, that isn’t all that easy, but it’s really not all that difficult either. Lakeside living in the summer is so many different things, but it isn’t hard.
Early in the summer, these things are not exactly hard, but they aren’t perfectly easy. School runs too late, sports stay too long. Later in summer, it’s the same. School starts too early, sports precede the school earliness and make for volleyball practice on sunny August mornings. That’s for our enduring shame, but the sporting and school cycles are something we must abide. After all, if little Timmy isn’t in pre-pre-season football camp, how on earth is he going to keep up with the kids once it’s just regular old pre-season? To say nothing of early season, which is when he’ll really be behind. Playoff season? Timmy won’t even make the expanded roster. Never mind, really, because your little Timmy is absolutely horrible at football, but his horribleness is ruining your summer, nonetheless.
That’s why early summer and late summer are hard, even if the middle of summer is somewhat lazy, and mostly easy. If late summer is hard, those days in August when the fall sports intrude, imagine how hard September is. There are things happening in September. School things, sports things, all sorts of things. If a Saturday in summer involves a city event that has to be accommodated, then that’s something that we’ll have to make happen. If, however, that Saturday event will be finished by 7 PM, then most times in the summer a family will make their way to the lake immediately after, because Sunday is still Sunday, and Sunday at the lake is so much better than Sunday in Whatever Town, Illinois.
In September, this rush to the lake is not so tangible. There are so many events and scheduling problems, however can we make it to the lake!? I must confess the author of this post is he who has routinely driven 3 hours in one direction in the morning, only to drive those same three hours in the returning direction by evening. I have no problem driving far distances to do something I like to do. I’ve even driven to the UP to fly fish and made the 11 hour round trip fit inside one 18 hour window. I am not afraid of the drive. That’s why if my little Timmy, who is the worst football player in the history of XYZ Junior High, had a game that he won’t play in on a Saturday evening, I’d drive my rear end, and the rear ends of the rest of my family, Loser Timmy included, up to the lake. Because while Timmy is just dreadful on the football field, he’s really great at diving off white piers.
I write today with the intent of shaming those who own here and let a three hour weekend event ground them for the entirety of the weekend. If Friday night means you must go on the town with your neighborhood friends, that’s cool. And if Saturday morning little Kimmy has volleyball practice, that’s fine, too. But then what? When the dinner has been eaten and Kimmy has sufficiently proven just how bad she is at the bumping and the setting and particularly the spiking, then what? Well, then we get into the car and drive the short drive North and we play. We play while we still can. Don’t want to go boating this Sunday because you think 75 isn’t warm enough? How badly we’ll wish we could boat inside 75 degree days once we’re battling to see a thermometer break 20.
Lake homes are a lot of work, they are. But for most, it isn’t the maintenance that bothers them, it’s their own lack of persistence in visiting them. I am not saying that juggling schedules isn’t difficult work, because I know that it is. I am simply saying that if we wish for the reward, we must put in the work. In this case, work is a short drive, and the reward is a September swim.
Above, my son after school on Wednesday. The dive looks similar to the one in a post below, except that it’s a September dive, which makes it better.