Driving into Lake Kathleen

Written May 6, 2006



I sat on my daddy’s knee and drove the Volkswagen bus when I was 5. The dust from the gravel road split the sunlight into beams, great clouds of it bubbling up from the tires. The steering wheel was almost horizontal, a huge disk I had to wheel around, a platter, to get around the curve into the parking lot of the auto court. Parking lot! more like a dirt clearing. My dad made a fuss about me driving, and I made a fuss about it afterwards, and for some reason, that moment, must have been less than a minute, resonates still. I can hear the crunch of gravel, smell the August air, feel the pull on my body, leaning to the side, as we rounded the bend. I can see aspens, pale green with sun shining through. The big house on the left as we enter, the rows down each side of small grey shingled cabins, the lake down the slope with it’s weathered dock and lily pads and toads and leeches. I remember grass or some grassy water weeds at the edge of the lake, the silty silky mud of the bottom between my toes, the cool water on hot days, the touch of current on my skin as I waded waist deep slowly through the lilies, the toads. Learned to haul myself up onto the hot wood of the dock, gazed at the tops of pilings, black with creosote and topped with such fat toads, as fat as 5 inches, even. What’s the name of a top decoration on a spire or a flagpole? That’s what those toads were, when they sunbathed.