Up the Lake- Toast

Once upon a time…

A pretty homogenous group consisting of Italians from the Bronx (and maybe some others, but they converted) that were part of “send city kids into the woods" projects were staying at camps on a lake up near Bear Mountain. 

By swimming or boating across that lake, they discovered a wonderfully enchanted land.  First they brought dates to this land for picnics, and over time those picnics rapidly progressed through sleep overs in tents, to platforms and finally hand built cabins allowing them to spend more time Up the Lake.  

The relationships of the dating couples also grew…into families.

Large, loving, loud families

For the next four to five generations, the descendants of that original group, (plus some very special friends who might as well be family) had a continuous series of crazy story and lifelong bond generating adventures every summer in, on and around those cabins and that Lake.

And now, after more than ninety years, it’s over.

We all knew it had to be over eventually…

No,

Wait.

That’s a complete lie.

We all knew it was GOING to be over eventually.

There are a ridiculous number of ways it didn’t have to be over, but we knew none of those would happen.

My daughter has known since gaining consciousness we’d have to stop going Up the Lake at some point. Considering my parents and I didn’t know until various stages of our adult lives, and my Grandparents possibly never knew, her having to live with that knowledge sucks more than non-Up the Lakers could imagine.

However, how much that knowledge sucked was nothing compared with how it came to be over.

I never imagined that anger could overtake sadness at the moment when it happened.

It was over without regard for:

History

Legacy

Compassion

Friendship

Good Business Practice

Or

Basic Arithmetic

Throw in the fact that there were several episodes of false hope to truly crush the kids’ (and adults’) spirits and it should be pretty clear why I had to rewrite this multiple times to remove profanity and keep it from being purely an incoherent rant.

Now with that out of the way:

I ask, in the spirit of respect for Up the Lake, that those who wish to share memories in the comments continue to keep profanity and ranting out of them, and maintain the focus on the many and varied positive times and relationships.

The extra catharsis to get past that urge for my sister and I came from having Grandpa Joe's rant  from the end of Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory run through our heads regularly during the endings of those false hope moments.  I hope you all can find something as well.

All of my Up the Lake family is deeply into bewildering grief right now.  Because of this, apologies in advance for wandering aimlessly between general and specific Up the Lake references for the rest of the post.

When describing our attachment to the place, most of us instantly start with: 
“It’s not the place, it’s the people.”  

But upon reflection, there’s a whole bunch that is "the place" too.

With multiple generations of everyone’s families, there are memories attached to everything.

EVERYTHING.

I could spin a myriad of tales from events in each and every cabin up there.

Heck, I am admittedly-

A) Terrified of heights

And

B) The World’s Worst handyman.

Yet, I have multiple memories and stories about repairing and working on the roof (and underneath the floor in some cases) of many different cabins, not only my own.

There were card and board games, enormous meals, social goofing around and the echoing giggles of children who stayed up too late in every kitchen.

There were sleepovers, furniture moving, and animal extractions in every bedroom. 

Even the outhouses, due to being two seaters, hosted everything from stolen cigarette moments, to conversations about key life events, to occasional drunken musical interludes.

  

This connection goes well beyond the Lake and the cabins to the land itself.  Every rock, tree, rut in the road, pathway, stone wall and empty field sang with the history of several family trees' worth of adventures.

See this rock?

My daughter used to stand on it to sing and perform when she was a tiny little girl with her cousins and friends.

Do you know who else performed on this rock when they were tiny and little with cousins and family?

Me and my sister…

And before that, my Mother and Aunt when they were tiny little girls.

You can’t bottle that.

One of the saddest sentiments I ever heard was when my cousin tragically lost her home in a fire.

She said something along the lines of-

When your house burns down, you lose a place to live.

But when your attic burns down, you lose your memories.

Picture everyone in your closest circle of family and friends having their attic burn down at once and you’ll get an inkling of what losing Up the Lake feels like.

The Lake went far beyond nostalgia though. It was the way it would inspire us to do things we wouldn’t normally do that created most of those stories we were nostalgic for.

My favorite place to read on the planet was sitting in front of the fire Up the Lake. 

I have a fire pit in the backyard.  I have books and flashlights in the house…

But I never read by the fire at home.

Because it’s hard to see fine print, and the flashlight is annoying to maneuver.  
Plus there’s bugs.  
Finding a comfortable position in outdoor furniture and determining the optimal distance from the fire is nearly impossible without igniting my shoelaces.  
Add in having a glass of wine when reading, and surviving the trip from the reading location inside to bed becomes questionable.

Yet all those things also applied Up the Lake.  Not only was I out there every night, but by that shopping cart occupied fireplace, or on the hammock on nights when it was too warm to be right next to the fire, were the only places I could fall asleep (with alarming frequency as I got older) without wearing a mouth guard and not wake up with a massive headache, jaw pain, and flakes of enamel in my mouth from grinding.

The same goes for the kids' constant desire to play card and board games up there.  Even on the occasions they want to play at home, it usually isn’t the same games, and the focus and togetherness are different.

Then there was the daily morning routine.

Breakfast shared certain features almost every day, and let me tell you something,

Or two things:

1) There is no finer tasting coffee than what came out of those percolators.

2) There is no finer tasting toast that what came off of that bizarre little folding contraption.

Yet, none of us lifelong Up the Lake residents make coffee or toast that way at home for ourselves because of the effort, complexity and mess.

The complexity is evidenced by the sheer number of times I tried to be “helpful” and screwed up the coffee on Up the Lake mornings over my lifetime.

I’ve blown the number of scoops, the perking time, and the location on the burner (melting the handle more than once.) 

Even when my Mom set it up the night before, as per usual, I tended to mix up which one was regular and which was decaf. 

On my worst morning, I did everything absolutely correctly, with the mild exception of not noticing there were no grounds inside the baskets, meaning I bubbled and brewed regular and decaffeinated water for eight minutes.

Yet coffee was used as the universal greeting. In recent years the summons was by text message, but well before cell phones existed a Bronx accent tinged bellow would often split the quiet woodland air, “COME DOWN, I PUT THE COFFEE UP!”

This would naturally lead to the aforementioned card and board games, enormous meals, social goofing around and the echoing giggles of children who stayed up too late.

Excellent toast was just as strongly connected to the Lake mornings as good coffee, if not more so.

Sure the system was far messier, burn inducing and time sensitive than electric models.  The camp toaster had the ability to turn raw bread into burnt cinders in the time it takes the person watching it to turn around and ask, “Did anyone see where I put my coffee?”

However, considering we all ate exponentially more toast off those racks compared to a standard toaster, often consuming entire loaves of bread on rainy mornings, surely it would be worth that hassle and mess at home. 

Yet none of us do it.

Part of it does go back to “not the place, it’s the people.”  

Someone was on toast duty each morning. There was no complaining, and no selection process, it just happened. We all knew how much everyone liked toast and whoever started cooking accepted they were keeping watch over output until the waves were done.  And if that person had to leave to confront some non-toast related emergency, a replacement would pop into place immediately and the production line would continue.

The fact that cooking less than five slices at a time threw off the air flow thermodynamics put a little selfishness into the altruism, but everyone still got toast, so it’s OK.

That highlights how Up the Lake combined “stuff you normally don’t do” with “it’s not the place it’s the people.”

The common saying goes, “You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family.”

That’s probably the least of the reasons we all refer to our “Up the Lake Family.”

Year after year, and generation after generation, we were thrown together to face ridiculous outdoor adventures for the summer.

This created connections that are far stronger than family in many cases with people from cliques (to use a pointless high school term to get the right meaning) we’d likely never associate with back in the Non Up the Lake World.

It became a weird mix of similarities and differences as the families all started from the same place, but grew in varied directions, generating unexpected friendships and an extensive knowledge pool.

I still know all the lyrics to “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, one of the most culturally important hip hop songs ever recorded, despite having no interest whatsoever in the genre.

Similarly, I introduced friends (and their kids) who would have never heard them in their usual geek free circles to novelty music featured on Doctor Demento Show.  "Shaving Cream" is funny to a ten year old regardless of upbringing, location, or decade.

I’m not, nor will I ever be a gambler, but I know a huge number of poker rules, strategies and derivatives.

And I’ve introduced four waves of kids (my age, my daughter’s age, and two in between) to Dungeons and Dragons, TSR Marvel, and other Role Playing  and strategy games.  It fills my heart with pride when one of them comes back as an adult reminiscing about the fun we had.

I learned random survival methods, and a bunch of off the straight and narrow path skill sets and occasional sneaky ways I’d never pick up from the nerdly crowd I fit in with at home.

On the other hand, during planning for some of those “sneaky ways” adventures at night, I’d answer questions about astronomy and cosmology under the unspoiled and star filled night sky to friends who would never consider them, or be able to see them in their less science oriented and light pollution filled home environs.

Cell phones and digital signal availability cut into the isolation a bit after a while, but in general, the main focus of every one Up the Lake was each other and the environment we were in.

That meant there were no differences we couldn’t work through, and no similarities we couldn’t bond over.

And now, it’s over.

Fortunately, the attic analogy is way off in one key respect.

We haven’t really lost our memories.

We’ve only lost our mementos.

Our memories will live on for the next five generations, and the next five after that, and well beyond, because any time more than two Up the Lakers gather- the stories flow freely and unconstrained, bringing back all the laughter, tears and love that generated them in the first place.

It’s far too painful to work on them now, but rest assured, there are SO MANY Up the Lake tales to come on this blog. The surface of all our years of compassionate insanity has only been scratched.

Until then, in true Up the Lake Tradition which matches how the cabins were built: cobbled together out of whatever was handy and modified to fit our purposes, here is the Up the Lake song fashioned from popular music, army cadences and campfire tunes dating back to the childhoods of the First (a.k.a. the Greatest) Up the Lake Generation.

We are the boys and girls from Indian Lake you hear so much about.

The people stop and stare at us whenever we go out

We're noted for our decency in everything we do

Most everybody likes us

We hope you like us too

Whiiiiiile we go maaaar-ching and the band begins to play 

Rah! Sis! Boom! Bah!

Youuuuu can hear us shouu-ting

The boys and girls from Indian Lake are on their way

Give a cheer for the Lake, give a cheer for the Lake, 
Give a cheer, give a cheer, give a cheer for the Lake

If you want to have a good time just come to Indian Lake

By the light, by the light by the light of the moon

By the light of the moon, by the light of the moon, 
By the light, by the light of the Silver-y (*) Moon.

The End

*-Note Depending on whose Up the Lake Grandmother you asked, the ending was either “Silvery Moon” or extra syllables in a final “Moooooooon.”  
I realize this note totally blows any shot at a poignant ending but:

1) It shows how the most basic of actions Up the Lake would easily transition into endless debates and discussions of how to do it, how our Grandparents used to do it, if there’s a new way to do it, and why we shouldn’t change the way we do it, leading to new stories.

2) It shows that while we came from the same starting point we were all different, but we don’t care and all love each other anyway. Sure we’ve all probably had our own jerktastic moments when those differences got out of hand from time to time, but things patched up quickly, because Up the Lake water is thicker than blood.  
(And in the excessively few and remote cases with individuals that were unpatchable: Man! did they give us buckets full of stories before they left)

3) It shows that there will never truly be a “The End” to Up the Lake, because the tales naturally chain off of each other in a constant flow of memories, friendships and togetherness.

Salut!

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