It was probably January of 2010 when I first hatched this idea. This blog had been doing fine, and some out there found it to be a valuable and quasi-entertaining way to follow the Lake Geneva market, and moreover the Lake Geneva scene. With the blog traffic increasing at a remarkable rate, I thought it might be a good idea to print a magazine of some sort. It wouldn’t be like the other real estate magazines that are heavy on small print and small photos and light on anything entertaining, instead it would be the opposite; heavy on entertainment and light on the details. I would call it Summer Homes For City People, a take off of the original sales brochure from the late 1800s that sought to lure wealthy Chicagoans to these developing shores. It would be the anti-real estate magazine, and when I first told my dad about it he thought it was a bad idea. As with most things, if he disagrees then I know I’m on the right heading, and so in a few months later I printed a magazine that was really more like a pamphlet. It was early June of 2010.
Fast forward to March 26, 2014, and that magazine has grown and prospered. By “prospered” I mean it loses me several thousand dollars each time I print it, so it’s more of a moral victory than a monetary one. Over these last years I’ve had a magazine designer whom I appreciated and enjoyed working with, but this year I’ve upped the game and switched to a professional designer. The result will be a new magazine, a better magazine, a more memorable magazine. It’ll be printing in mid-May, and this is effectively a last call for vacation home owners who may become sellers in the next 60 days to enroll their property in the coming issue. The power of a full page spread for a lakefront home is somewhat overwhelming, and there is simply no better way to get your property in front of many tens of thousands of eyeballs than by listing with me and letting me lavish praise upon your lakefront home.
That’s the new cover up there, an original Neal Aspinall piece, clean and pretty, like this lake. That’s your sneak peak of the cover, and here’s a sneak peak at the regurgitated content that fills the interior pages, or at least the ones that don’t feature your home, or the ones that don’t feature incredible lake photographs from all-star local photographers. There will be between 15-18 “stories” like this, and they should work in concert with the house photos and the lake photos and that marvelous cover to reinforce our feelings about this lake that we are so lucky to live and play on. If you’re a seller, you know what to do. If you might be a seller, your job is the same. If you’re a lakefront owner, and you think your neighbor might be interested in selling, you also know what to do.
The Smell Of Our Success
If you can smell your lake, you better find another one
I remember the first time I smelled an ocean. It was the Atlantic, off of Daytona Beach, and my family had just driven from Disney World in a rented, white Lincoln Towncar. My brother’s fingers had not yet been smashed between the window and the door frame, as my family struggled with the dangerous convenience of power windows. The sea was rough, filled with kelp, mostly gross. I went swimming, but I didn’t like the beach, I didn’t like the water–not the way it tasted nor the way it looked nor the way it smelled– and I certainly didn’t leave the beach that day thinking that the Atlantic ocean was something I should get to know. The year was 1985.
It wasn’t until 1997 that I went back, this time not to the Atlantic side but to the Gulf, and I found the tamer water much more interesting. Kelp didn’t wrap around my legs when I swam, and I didn’t get the sense of danger that I was overwhelmed by 12 years prior. I liked the Gulf side, and so I went back, again and again, from that day until this day. One year, I was greeted by a noxious onslaught of Red Tide. Most other years it was just the sweet smell of the salty backwaters that met me, that somewhat stinky, somewhat spoiled smell that emits from exposed muddy bottomed flats, a smell made by dead organisms of all sorts slowly decaying back into the salty, silty bottom. While some find that smell off-putting, to me that smell is a welcome sign that I have left behind, if momentarily, a cold climate and traded for a warmer one.
Lots of lakes smell. They do. Don’t get all bent out of shape about it, Other Lakes, the truth of this matter is- you smell. It isn’t the sweet smell of the rotting backwaters of western Florida, it’s just the smell of dead fish intermixed with slippery seaweed, an empty bag of Funyons and some crayfish claws. I used to live near enough to one of these other lakes. When I lived there, at times I’d go for a walk. Some of those walks led me just down a nice road and around some fields and woods, and back again. Other walks, I’d venture down a nearby road and walk along the corner of this lake for a spell. This was a horrible thing for me to do, because that lake, at least in that corner, smelled like all this dead and evil. It smelled like nothing should ever smell, even if I would tolerate the smell every now and again and throw a five weight line to some eager panfish.
I fish plenty of rivers. Most of these rivers are more like streams, and these small streams do not smell like much. Even if they did, it’s impossible to smell what the water smells like when surrounded by a field where cows graze, on account of the cow pies that they leave to bake in the sun. Other rivers I fish, those of the Root, the Pike, and the Milwaukee; those rivers smell, all right. They don’t smell sweet like the gulf waters, nor do they smell like dead things of all varieties like the water in that corner of that old lake, nor do they smell of manure like the streams. They smell like a toxic mix of sewer run off, garbage, and sadness. These are rivers that have been forced to flow through urban areas, though these rivers so badly wish they could flow somewhere else. They flow, from West to East, and as they flow through cities they pick up all the things that are bad and then deliver it downstream into Lake Michigan. I’d give quite a bit of money to have a chance to know what Steelhead fishing on the Root River was like back in 1850. I’d need to bring with some penicillin, a rifle, and my cell phone, but I’d still like to go.
What exactly is water supposed to smell like? Every lake, every river, and every ocean answers that question differently. Ask that question to Geneva and Geneva will answer as though on Jeopardy, with another question: Who says a lake is supposed to smell like anything? And that, Alex, is the right answer. There are moments when areas of Geneva will smell as any other lake. There are. Certain corners that give way to oncoming winds are apt to smell like whatever algae bloom has just occurred, but the general smell around the lake on any given day is exactly nothing. There might be a dead fish here and there, and if you’re downwind of said dead fish then you’re going to smell that fish, but that’s the case anywhere. What we’re after here is the true smell of the lake, of any lake, and my olfactory sense tells me that Geneva smells as pure and clean as anything ever could, which is to say that it smells like nothing.