The Lake Where You Live

Do you go into a kind of mourning when your season on the lake ends? Near the close of the 1981 movie “On Golden Pond,” the elderly Norman and Ethel Thayer go down from their cabin to “say goodbye to the lake.” It’s autumn, the leaves have turned, and it’s time to return to their winter home.

We don’t have to say that goodbye, but taking the skeletal structure of the pier out of the water has a similar finality. Still, it’s nice to end on series of wondrous October days, and I remember in particular one perfect day on which I did the year’s final lakefront chore. The mid-morning temperature was the low 60s with barely a whisper of breeze, the sun just clearing the treetops, in the sky a few billows of white, puffy clouds. 

In some of the years we have lived here, the cold has set in early and hard, persistent snow and temperatures in the teens, starting around mid-month and continuing with little letup well into official winter. I’ve taken the pier frame out while bundled in a heavy coat and a stocking hat pulled over my ears, the metal parts too to handle without gloves.

That wasn’t the case on the day I’m recalling. Wearing hip boots, holding a ratchet socket wrench, I looked out over the lake. Apparently other folks had used an uncommonly pleasant late-fall weekend to remove their docks and drag their boat lifts onto land. As best I could see, ours was the last pier still in the water.

On such a day I should have been fishing. I’ve had some memorable walleye days in past mid-Octobers, but this time I had already sent the boat into storage, and so was marooned on land with work to do. 

Slowly, methodically, I unbolted the side rails. Using a cloth wet with lake water I gently scrubbed the season’s accumulated dirt off the rails and then, one by one, carried them ashore and slid them into place behind the white trunk of a birch tree. Then I washed the surfaces of the support stands before lifting them free and stacking them against the upslope of our hill. There’s satisfaction in putting things away clean.

The whole job takes a leisurely hour, maybe a little more. Having finished, I wasn’t yet ready to leave the idyllic scene. I waded out to ankle-deep, stopped, and look around. There was just one boat on the lake, a pontoon, cruising slowly along the opposite shoreline. I heard a single three-note call of a loon from not too far away but couldn’t spot the bird. Other than that, there were no sounds except the occasional peeps of chickadees from deep in the woods behind me.

As I stepped out of the water and turned down the path that leads to the stairway, I took one last look. It was strange now to see only smooth water instead of the pier, the take-off point for more than five months of Birch Lake adventures. Still, this wasn’t goodbye to the lake, and I’m always grateful for the benign and brilliant bonus days of October.