If I could live anyplace on earth, I would live on the shores of a lake in northern Michigan. Maybe it's because that's where we vacationed when I was a boy, or just because I've always loved being in, on, or around water. Whatever the reason may be, that's where I'd live. There's something about the calmness of being at the water's edge, especially in the evening, listening to the waves splash as they gently roll up on the shore, surrounded by the sweet fragrance of pine trees.

I started loving "going to the lake" when I was very small. My parents owned a small travel trailer. They parked it on a sandy lot at a resort next to Big Star Lake near Baldwin. It probably wasn't much bigger than an average bedroom. Mom and Dad's bed was in the back, there was a stove and icebox amidships, and a dinette up front folded down to make a bed for me. Uncle Bill and Aunt Marion had one parked two lots down, and Grandpa and Grandma parked theirs two lots up. We'd leave for the trailer early on Saturday mornings in the summer. My folks put my pillow and some blankets in the back of the old Chevy wagon. Before sunrise we'd get up and have breakfast, and then we'd get in the car and I'd lay down in my nest and go back to sleep. A few hours later I'd wake up in my bed in the trailer, ready to put on my swimming suit and hit the lake. (For those of you who are appalled at the thought of a three-year-old sleeping unrestrained in the back of a car, remember this: It was almost fifty years ago.  There were no toddler seats, side-curtain air bags, or even seat belts. Deal with it.)  I'd run barefoot across the hot sand toward the lake just so I could cool off in the wet sand at the shore.  Great entertainment back then involved laying on the dock and watching schools of minnows as they sunned themselves in the shallows. Hundreds of little silver fishies turned this way and that in unison as I waved my hand over them. Dad, Grandpa, and Uncle Bill fished during the day, returning to camp as evening came. After tasty suppers of freshly-caught bluegills, bass, and sunfish, the grown-ups sat outside in folding chairs while I dug in the sand until sundown, when the colored lights on dozens of awnings came on. Mom would slip back in the trailer and turn the kitchen table back into my bed, and then it was time to go inside.

The trailer was sold when I was about four.  I needed an operation so Mom and Dad let it go. But that wasn't the end of our lakeside days. Not long after, Grandpa and Grandma found a place to camp up on Silver Lake, south of Traverse City. The new campground was smaller than the resort on Big Star, but it lacked nothing in northern charm and coziness. A cherry farm with a white barn stretched out along the road across the lake. Three tiny cabins lined the path back to the trailer camp. A fourth nestled among the pine and cedar trees on a hillside. In ten years' time we stayed in all four of them, but the one in back, the big cabin, was our favorite. It had one great room with a kitchen in one corner by the door and a woodstove at the other end. There were two bedrooms at the back, and a full-length screen porch ran across the front. I slept on a bed under a window down on the wood-stove end of the cabin. A gentle, balmy breeze blew over me, turning gradually cooler as the nights deepened. I fell asleep to the sounds of bullfrogs and crickets. Every boy should have the privilege of camping in a place where he can sleep on a screen porch.

For me, though, the highlight of that campground was the lake. It was murkier than Big Star, and the swimming area was smaller. But that didn't diminish the fun of hitting the water, and as we grew older my friends and I found we could swim off the end of the dock instead of being confined to the area near the shore. The truest sign of young manhood was when you could swim out past "the drop-off" without an adult yelling from the shore that you were out too far and you'd better come back. And once we could swim that far, all kinds of new adventures opened to us.

One summer when I was about 14 my friends Doug and Leslie and I spent an afternoon swimming off the drop-off when we decided what we needed was a raft to jump from. The nearest thing we had to a raft was one of the rowboats that came with the cabins. No one was using ours, so we unpacked the seat cushions and fishing tackle, piling them neatly on the shore. We towed the boat into the lake out near the drop off, where we planned to swamp it and then we'd have our diving raft. The plan was a simple one. On three, we'd all jump up on the side of the boat, and it would flip over us, at which time we'd let go and swim under it. An easy plan, nothing complicated about it. We all grabbed the gunwale and rocked the boat as Les counted. "One...two...three!"

Doug jumped. Les jumped. I jumped. The far side of the boat rose.

My suit remained at the waterline.

I let go of that boat like it was on fire! I dropped back in the lake, much to Doug and Les's disappointment. "You were supposed to hang on!" Doug exclaimed.

"I couldn't!" I spat, yanking furiously at my drawstring. Quickly, the embarrassment of mooning the campground washed away like muck off my toes and we finally did flip that boat over. We climbed up on it, standing carefully on the slippery bottom and then we jumped off, again and again, doing cannonballs and can-openers until dinnertime. When Doug's sister Jenny (who thankfully wasn't around earlier!) came to fetch them, we righted the boat and dragged it back to the shallows. Doug and Les had to take off, so I was left to bail it out and re-pack it.

That was the last major camping trip we took Up North. We still went family camping with our church friends, but it wasn't quite the same. I still went swimming and boating, but those trips were always short-term affairs, just weekends. I didn't spend a week on a lake again until my son was in Boy Scouts.

Swimming with the Scouts is different than swimming in your own lake. For one thing, Scout camps have lifeguards, and lifeguards have rules. And whistles.  If you get too wild you get whistled and warned. And you have to take a swim test. The swim test was no big deal when I was a Scout, but when I was an out-of-shape adult it became a challenge! The rules haven't changed; you swim a hundred feet on your chest, turn over, and float on your back for a minute. Completing it as a kid was a mere formality. Finishing that hundred feet when I was forty was a cause for celebration!

And now Memorial Day is upon us and there are no plans to camp on a lake. It really is a pity. It's something I wish we would have done more often when our son was younger. We did a few weekend trips with our church friends, but we stayed at a campground with a pool. A pool, for crying out loud! Even though there was a lake nearby, but they sprayed it for weeds Memorial Day weekend so you couldn't swim in it. Hopefully there will be time to make amends. Perhaps one day we'll have grandkids, and when that happens I'll consider it my bounden duty and privilege to pick up a carefully-used travel trailer or a small cabin. And after everybody's cinched down their drawstrings real tight, I'll take them out and teach them how to swamp a rowboat.