Round Island

 

The lake was still and inviting this morning when I took out the Old Town canoe to paddle over to Round Island, site of many memories. I started this blog just a year ago here on Long Lake where I’ve spent part or all of every summer for the past eight decades.  I was indeed “ruminating,” chewing over so many memories from my childhood, memories of my parents—especially my mother who brought us here—my four big sisters who taught me everything about swimming and rowing and diving and fishing, even about cooking, although I just watched and consumed and was for many years kept out of the kitchen.

We had electricity and running water and indoor toilets, but only one tub reserved for my mother and me, no shower. My sisters had to bathe and wash their hair in the lake, and did so without complaining because Long Lake, unlike Lake Michigan, was never icy cold once you got past mid-June. In 2020 of course, Lake Michigan is no longer cold.

Back then in my childhood we had a canoe, a snipe for sailing, and a motorboat with a little 4hp  motor that got us slowly where we wanted to go.  And oars when the motor failed, as often happened. Prime destinations were Mickey Lake, aka the Lily Pond, directly across the lake from us, where we looked for turtles, or the little grocery store further down the shore from our beach for sodas or ice cream popsicles or simply an ingredient needed by whoever was cooking the dinner that night.

But for me the biggest treat was when we would motor over for a picnic on Round Island, a beautiful little island that back then had three huge Norway pines towering like skyscrapers over the island. The east end of the island has a sandbar with a dropoff about 10 feet out from shore to a depth of 20 feet or more.  The west end where we picnicked had a steep sandy cliff.  I loved running up and down the sandy cliff which no longer exists because so many people over so many years did exactly that, eroding it further and further back.  Over time, also, each of the three pines fell. 

Now the memory of those pines evokes for me Louise Penny’s wonderful narratives with Chief Inspector Armand Gamache solving crimes of ever greater complexity, but always returning for nurture to the hamlet of Three Pines. My daughter Julie long ago painted the island while the trees were still there. She even included the red barn one can see on a hill nearby. 

 In that memoried past ten young people would row or paddle over for an evening picnic. Once there, some would swim; others would look for blueberries. As the sun went down we would sit around a fire grilling hamburgers and toasting marshmallows and singing campfire songs. There were ten of us because my aunt Nelly, like my mother, had four older children and then one a decade later like me. My cousin Leigh was just two years older than me, but always much more daring.  I was a bookworm; she was a tomboy.  Many an afternoon I’d be curled up in her mother’s livingroom with a book while Leigh was out playing soft ball with the local farm kids our age. We never had much in common except our age, but family legend has it that my mother decided to have me, her late baby, after Aunt Nelly had Leigh, and so I remain grateful to her and to Aunt Nelly for my existence.

My aunt never came on the picnics—no idea why, except that like me she was a passionate reader who loved to be alone in her cottage reading or working on a jigsaw puzzle, so perhaps these family outings for us meant happy solitude for her. She was an art critic for the Chicago Tribune and had columns to write so that an empty cottage could have been just what she needed.

With ten young people, a couple of dogs, and all the provisions for the picnic, we must have come in several boats. I can feel even now the excitement of those evenings as it gradually got dark, the sun setting as we looked out over the lake.  The fire blazed up, sparks flew. We grilled hamburgers and toasted marshmallows, and we would sing songs, standard campfire song, often rounds.  One of my cousins sometimes brought a guitar.

Those evenings always ended early for me.  My mother would pack up whatever needed taking back in the motorboat and take me home for an early bedtime while the teenagers all stayed until much later.  As I got older and when I had children of my own, we sometimes took a tent and camped on the island overnight, stargazing if it was a moonless night, or enjoying the moon and its path across the water.

Round Island is now carefully monitored.  No fires, no dogs, no camping, the eroded cliff carefully buttressed with stairs and tiered to retain what’s left of the cliff.  But even with all those restrictions the island remains a magnet, the best place for watching sunsets. Long Lake is L-shaped and the island is right where the two arms join so that you can overlook the lake, boats, loons, in all directions. Stunning in the sunshine as it rises out of the lake, it is transformed into something mysterious and only half visible, like Brigadoon, in the evening twilight.  For me it remains a place of magic and memory.