It's Gone
Six years ago I wrote an essay titled "Please Don't Sell the Lake." As a rhetorical device, I wrote it to my grandparents. Twelve pages, double-spaced, on the profound attachment I felt to the house on the shore of Lake Almanor where my family had spent every summer of my life.
Sometimes as long as three weeks, sometimes just a weekend. So I started the essay by saying:
I feel like 'attachment' is a wholly inadequate word to express how connected I feel to the Lake. The Lake is the only constant place I have ever known. It has been a place that has lived in my dreams for as long as I can remember. It is a home for my truest self, for my very soul.
Last month they sold it.
I really have no right to complain. It was their house. It didn't belong to me, but still... I feel like I belonged to it. To that place. In the essay I wrote things like:
It feels so big. The world that stretches out past row after serrated row of silhouetted mountain horizons from Chico to Eagle Lake, from 395 through the high desert to the Lava Tunnel near Old Station...
Tying all the luggage on top of the talking station wagon, so Prince could pant into his water bowl in the back. The nine hour drive up Highway 5 from LA. Calling out “Rock! Rock! Rock!” as we wound around Highway 147 during the drought years of my early childhood, when you could see the rock big and hulking through the speeding pine trees.
And yet, when I look back over the essay, I'm struck by how it's not really about the place. It's about my grandparents. I got to know them there. Any of the life lessons they taught me, any of their wisdom, came from being at the Lake together.
Take this part:
Watching Nana garden in her bathrobe. Waiting for the sun to warm the beach and the yellow wildflowers to open. Stepping around the dead fish washed up on the slimy rocks. That beached raft I jumped up and down on top of and got stung by a hundred bees. Nana knew exactly what to do, with her country medicine, packing my legs in mud to suck the poison out as it dried.
In that last few years, as I’ve wanted more and more to take my high school and college friends up to the Lake to water ski, I’ve forgotten how much family history I have in that country. I’ve forgotten that Nana spent all herchildhood summers there, when my great-grandfather, Lloyd Hardgrave, would leave his pediatric practice in San Francisco every June to return to the family ranch in Indian Valley.
That's why I can't believe they sold it. The Lake brought our family together, made us a family, really. I didn't lose a vacation house; I lost that living memory of my childhood, my heritage, my grandparents. That's why I didn't want them to sell it.
