Fourth of July weekends at my aunt’s and uncle’s lake house, an hour south of St. Louis, gave me some of my favorite childhood memories. A modest brick home with a spacious balcony, it sat high up a rocky drive with a mere glimpse of the shallow cove where we had so much fun.
So, my wife and I bought a house on a lake in northwest Connecticut, near the Berkshires, thinking I could create the same magic for our three kids.
Magical thinking is more like it: I wonder how the adults back then made those extended gatherings look so easy. Don’t get me wrong. We love hosting. But sometimes I want to scream. Like when the Wi-Fi buckles under the weight of eight people streaming videos, gaming, uploading, downloading and whatever else causes a router to surrender — and they all glare at me as though I personally failed the internet. Never mind that I bought the most expensive plan they had. The guy at the cable store spoke to me in hushed tones when he installed the gear. I’m pretty sure it could mine Bitcoin.
That earns me the universal oh-Dad look. The one suggesting I think the cloud is actual weather. They sigh dramatically until the spinning wheel of death disappears and they can once again return to ignoring one another together.
Meanwhile, soiled laundry is colonizing the staircase. A sack of garbage ran out of gas halfway to the trash can. The dishwasher: I may sound unwell, but if Miele engineers witnessed the chaos unfolding inside that machine, they would deny involvement. I thought loading from the back was settled law. Oh, Dad.
How did the adults of my youth manage these gatherings so effortlessly? Part of the answer is Oh, Dad, too: Life was simpler. Lake houses were more affordable then, and less fancy. No dishwasher, no A.C., no TV.
And no choices. Meals happened at fixed times. You ate what appeared. Cleanup by committee followed, and then the moms would declare, “The kitchen is closed,” with despotic authority. If we got hungry later, there were snacks. Snacks that would make a nutritionist spiral: Ruffles and onion dip, port wine cheese food. Breakfast was sugary cereal. Lunch was mystery bologna. Dinner was barbecue, beans and slaw. Repeat until Labor Day.
Do not attempt this today. My kids treat cereals such as Frosted Flakes like modern-day controlled substances. Where’s the zero-fat Greek yogurt and organic granola? Where are the brown eggs from free-range chickens with better health care than I have? My family is unquestionably eating more nutritiously today. But how do you find space for food in a fridge packed with soy milk, almond milk, oat milk, nonfat milk and a carton of whole milk that nobody touches? Answer: We go grocery shopping every day.
Simpler had its own problems. Everyone went outside and got dirty because there was literally nothing else to do. Going outside and getting dirty begged for trouble. I nearly blinded my cousin during a bottle-rocket war that, in hindsight, had an unsettling lack of oversight. One holiday ended early after I crashed a motor scooter and broke my hip. I was 10.
My cousin and I once pinched cigarettes from mom’s purse — parents were still smokers then — and after our first taste coughed like we had swallowed a bug. That was before I accidentally swallowed a bug.
We went foraging in the woods once only to discover we lacked trail-marking skills and probably couldn’t fend off a squirrel. By sundown, half the lake community was searching for us. We were rescued by a stranger in an old pickup. “Hop in the back,” he said. Seatbelts weren’t a thing, and “stranger danger” hadn’t entered the vernacular. We climbed in immediately.
At the lake, we took chances. We stretched boundaries. We tinkered endlessly with that cursed motor scooter, inhaling gasoline fumes while rigging the governor to go faster than any reasonable person intended. We jumped into swampy coves and felt the muck squish beneath our feet.
We shot arrows and BB guns at makeshift targets because apparently nobody in the 1960s thought children should be unarmed. A few years later, we graduated to skeet shooting with a shotgun, which today sounds less like childhood and more like grounds for a lawsuit.
Which raises an obvious question: Why, exactly, did we want to recreate this experience for our own children? Well, we couldn’t. Our kids did things differently. Although the onion dip and port wine cheese food survived the generations untouched. You don’t tamper with institutions.
They investigated the woods, too, though mostly on marked trails. They also spent plenty of time in the water, boating and skiing. But we didn’t arm them. We weren’t nearly as quick to shove them outside and lock the screen door. The kitchen stayed open. There were board games and card games. At the lake, they learned Parcheesi, Risk and how to exist without a screen for stretches approaching several consecutive minutes.
The basic premise obtained: At the lake, kids do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do.
As kids, we never really knew what the adults were up to. They appeared to play a lot of cards and tennis. Their other activities generally involved a drink in hand and a level of laughter suggesting they were having a far better holiday than the kids realized.
One night, heading to bed, I found my dad and my uncle asleep and snoring on the screened porch floor — horizontal on unfinished wood planks. I was 8 years old and looked at my mom in amazement. “That’s what you call a clear conscience,” she said. I didn’t understand what she meant then. I do now.
The adults had worked hard to create those good times. The food, the activities, the noise, the laughter, the traditions. None of it happened accidentally. They were the ones planning and shopping and quietly absorbing the stress so the rest of us could experience the fun. Things only looked effortless because we were clueless.
Dad and my uncle had probably enjoyed themselves a little too much that day. But they were celebrating something real: the joy of having everyone together, healthy, loud — mostly safe — and making memories under a crowded roof. That is what makes the lake special. It’s a place to push limits, to squeeze in together, to annoy one another, to tell stories that improve with age. The Wi-Fi crashes, the dietary clashes, the dishwasher wars — those aren’t interruptions to the experience. They are the experience.
