Out here at the lake, we didn’t get electricity until I was seven years old. It was one of many things we didn’t have much of. City folks had faucets and toilets and lights and cars that ran and lots of good stuff…maybe more than they needed.
We lit the kerosene lamps and woodstoves and the old rusty pump that always needed a prime. Ours was the smelly, bone chilling two-seater outhouse with a pail of corn cobs and a Sears Roebuck catalogue that never got read. What we had was old Nelly and Fred, the laziest boney team in the township that hated the plow, couldn’t pull a straight furrow and always looked for a shade tree.
All’s there was out here was mostly plain everyday lake folks with their backs to the wall who wouldn’t give in to grunt or grit. Great-grandpa Filley was born during the Civil War, sweated his skinny ass off and died in the cornfield at 42 from a busted appendix. He left great-granny Emma, with 10 kids, 2 hogs and a coop half-empty of hungry chickens. For eats, she had a big bushel of bank payments on a farm that couldn’t grow rocks.
But what she did have was acres and acres of “worthless” undeveloped lakefront property that she gave to her 10 kids. After 107 years and six generations later, we’re still paying the taxes so our grandpups can dangle their feet and swim off the piers. What a timeless blessing for everyone along the way.
Today, there’s over 300 houses squashed in around the lake, but back then, besides the farmhouse and barn, there were only two deserted shacks. Before the family lumbered off part of the west woods to build the oak barn, they had logs and old tree branches lay over the top of a big, deep gully that was covered with cornstalks and sod to shelter the livestock through the winters. Thinking back on that old barn…to leap off the high hand-hewn beams, to land on your back in the deep, soft haymow was the simple summer thrill. Just laying there staring up at the pigeons in the loft and sniffing the fragrant new mown hay and watching Tabby, the old mouser, doing her job…I could close my eyes and be back there right now.
How quietly beautiful and simple it was. Just waves and wind and lots of no people. Just pheasants in the cornshalks, mallards and loons and maybe a blue heron fishing off the pier. Loads of muskrat houses down by the creek and lots of mink in the cattails. The lake was as clear as a blue diamond and even a boy at sundown could catch a mess of fish with a pin at the end of a string. They’d bite on anything. Even the sagging old pier was loaded with good eating turtles. A time before motor boats, jet skis and boom boxes.
But big rattlesnakes were a problem. Everyone was poor and none of the kids wore shoes over the summer. There were no lawns or lawnmowers back then and the shoreline was mostly low and wet overgrown marshland, crawling with fanged critters that darn near killed my dad. When he was just a little shaver, about 5, he dug some worms from the manure pile for fishing with his stick and hook. Barefooted at the bottom of the hill, he didn’t see the big one basking in the sun, but sure felt the fans and ran screaming for granny. Back then, big shots of whiskey and a pat on the back were supposed to cure about anything. Although reputed to kill all kinds of bad germs, it darn near killed this little kid before the galloping buckboard hauled him off to Old Doc Lewis in Vandalia. After that misadventure, they decided to cordon off the marsh with a split rail fence along the top of the ridge and let the hogs loose to clean out the rattlers. It took about a year for them to solve the problem.
Winters were long and miserable. No one could afford coal, so by morning the woodstove’s were cold and the dog dish froze solid. As the livestock got watered, the cows were milked and it was up to the kids to light the lanterns, bring in the wood and kindle the stoves. Chores from get-up, to go-to-bed, were a grim reality of survival. Nobody complained and things just got done.
As the woodpile shrunk down to nothing, snow melted, the lake ice finally broke loose and spring mud was up to the hubs. Many a day, for a dollar, they’d harness the team to pull an overheated, skinny tired Model T Ford out of the gumbo. “Get a horse”, we chided as we fed it water and he cranked it back to life.
It was a straight simple time when there was “right from wrong” and everybody knew it. City lawyers were an expensive nuisance with big words and paper and nobody needed ‘em. Your fence line, a handshake, your straight-in-the-eyeball family word of honor and a shotgun was all you needed.
This morning, many decades and vintages later, while watching the wind and the waves, we sat there together, little Noah and me, on the old swing in front of the farmhouse. Puzzled, he looked up and asked why my old grandpa hands were so boney, wrinkled and tired looking. I thought about that for a minute, leaned down, smiled and quietly whispered, “Grandpup…yep, they earned their scars and are tired now, and ready to be put to bed.” He just nodded and went to sleep.
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