The amazing weather we’ve been having has me thinking about summer and August specifically. There was so much to love about the summer when I was a kid much of that took place in July and August and some of my best memories took place at Loon Lake.
My grandmother and her husband had a cabin at Loon Lake which is about 30 miles north, northwest of Spokane. Loon Lake is not particularly large, it’s only 1100 acres, roughly two miles wide and a mile long. It has a maximum depth of 100 feet. I didn’t know that growing up. When I was a kid it seemed as though it was immense and filled with mystery and unfathomable depths. Certainly it was the scene of many adventures when I was growing up.
My grandmother lived at the lake for most of the summer and stayed there occasionally throughout the year. It wasn’t a particularly large plot, but it was distinct in my memory.
It always started with loading up the car. Sometimes it was with my mom and my dad. Sometimes it was riding with my aunt and as many of her kids as would fit in the station wagons they had over the years. Traffic never seemed to be particularly heavy but the anticipation was enough to make those 30 or so miles crawl in my recollection so the 40 or 45 minutes of driving seemed to take forever.
Talk in the car, at least amongst the kids, was all focused on the lake and most often on who would be able to get out of the car and in to the lake the fastest. Bets were made, challenges set, pride put on the line.
Eventually, after what seemed like far too long, we’d pull off 395 north out of Spokane on to the South Road which wiggled up and down the shore along the lake, passing the many cabins that surround the lake. We knew we were getting close by this time so the excitement amongst the kids in whatever car we were in mounted as we’d catch flashes of the blue lake in between the trees.
Depending on the time of the year, the lake varied from chilly to very comfortably warm. June was a bit iffy in terms of temperature, it was still warming from the cold winter and spring. By Fourth of July, the lake could be counted on to be nice and warm. August days at the lake were days filled with warm water, sunshine and food. They were my favorite.
There was never parking down below so the adult parked cars above the cabin on the street above or in the little pullout for guests to the cabin. There was a reasonably steep hill and driveway from the car parking down to the cabin, the beach and the water. The goal was to be entirely prepared for when the car came to a stop and the doors would explode open and a clown-car’s worth of kids would burst from the vehicle to race down the hill in a mad race to make it to the lake and in to the water first. I always had glasses so I don’t think I ever won these races, at least not against my cousins as all the boys were at least a year older than I was. I also had to stop to take off my glasses and put them somewhere safe. That said, the goal was still to tear down that hill as fast as we could.
There were hazards to contend with, to be clear. Chief amongst those were the parents and adults who wanted to immediately task the kids with carrying things, usually food, down the hill for them. Reasonable? Certainly. Welcome? Absolutely not! Additional hazards included the occasional fall, but that was pedestrian and an unacceptable excuse. There was always the chance that grandma would be out and you absolutely had to stop to give her a kiss and say hello. That was understood.
But, if none of those things slowed us, we would tear down that hill, across the backyard area where the adults hung out and drank beer and visited, down across the narrow, sandy beach, throwing towels and shoes and shirts everywhere then out the dock as fast as our feet would carry us and then leap from the end of the dock, fly through the air and sunshine and be that first person in the water. It was glorious.
That lake was my (and probably my mother’s) motivation for learning how to swim. If you were not a strong swimmer, there was a clear understanding that you had to wear one of those bright orange life jackets if you were going to be in the water past your chest. And only the little kids would be caught dead in the water at the end of the dock dog paddling around in the bright orange jackets. What you wanted to be was one of the big kids who knew how to swim because those kids could swim from the end of the dock all the way out to the 10′ square ski dock which was probably fifty feet away from the end of the dock.
When I was little (eight or so), the really cool kids were the ones who were swimming without life jackets and swimming out to the ski dock and laying in the sunshine out there. That’s where I wanted to be!
As I said, Loon Lake wasn’t large, but in my mind it had once been filled with large fishing vessels and there was clearly mystery to be found beneath the surface. There was a small rowboat that the bigger kids could take out and the expectation was that you occasionally had to take out the little kids with you. It was something done reluctantly and not without some resentment. We weren’t allowed to go very far but there was a small island with a cabin on it to the west and we would row around that telling stories about the hermit that probably lived on the island in the cabin because we never saw anyone there, ever! To the east a bit there was a long rowboat of some sort that had probably sunk after breaking free from a dock and with the sunshine just so and if the visibility was sufficient, we could rover over top of that boat and look down and just make it out in the depths below. That, of course, became some sort of sunken boat with attendant stories of people drowning in the storm and their bodies never being found. I remember those stories being very effective as I went through a short period where I was convinced that skeletal hands would reach up from the depths to pull me under! These were not rational fears as I also went through a period where I was pretty sure that a shark attack was a possibility. If nothing else, it served as a motivation to swim fast across the top of the water to reach the ski dock and pull myself out before whatever was below the surface either ate me or grabbed me.
I know the adults would fish in the lake but for the kids, fishing meant sitting on the end of the dock with one of the many small poles. We would bait the hooks with small pieces of niblet corn which my grandmother always seemed to have on hand. We could dangle the corn and the hook down a few feet and within a few minutes be almost certain of catching a fish. The lake was filled with sunfish which were just a garbage fish in the lake. Usually we would remove the hook by carefully running our hands down the line from the front towards the back to hold down spines of their fins, grabbing the body and freeing the hook. We were pretty sure the same fish would be back on the line before lunch time. The game there was to keep count and see who could catch the most fish. It wasn’t hard, though, because even if there were no fishing rods, all it really took was about six feet of line, a weight and a hook and you could catch fish. Not a bright fish.
One of my most visceral recollections was sitting on the dock fishing. One of the rules was you weren’t allowed to cast because the last thing you wanted was a little kid flinging a hook around back and forth amongst a bunch of other kids. My mom was down there for some reason and I was down there and suddenly I felt a sharp pain and a slight tug at the corner of my eyelid! My mom yelled “STOP!” at the top of her lungs and everyone, for that is the force of a mother’s voice, stopped everything, probably within a hundred feet. Turns out one of the kids, not a cousin, not a regular but someone’s guest, had tried to cast, had flung the rod back over their shoulder and the hook (baited with a small piece of niblet corn) had caught in my eyelid! Had that kid flung his or her cast forward, bad things would almost certainly have happened but because my mom had caught it, she was able to remove it before the fishing went badly that day.
Eventually, as with all things, the cousins started growing up, my grandmother got older and there were fewer events hosted there. I was probably 15 the last time we went out to the cabin on Loon Lake.
Years and years later I took my own kids up to Spokane and we stayed at a rental cabin on Loon Lake. One day we rented a canoe and, here was one way I came to understand that the lake was not immense body of water it had been when I was little, we paddled across the lake to the cabin that had been one of my favorite places to be. My grandmother and her husband, Frank, had passed and I think the cabin was owned by his kids but I never knew them so we just paddled by as I pointed out the cabin to my kids.
Before we went back, I made a point of going just a few cabins further along and told my kids the story of a boat full of people out on a stormy lake sinking and no bodies being found and sure enough, as the late August sun lanced through the murky water below, I was able to point out to them where the remains of that boat remained after all those years, hopefully leaving my kids with the same spooky possibilities that had made my adventures there so memorable when I was growing up.
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