What They’ll Remember
One of my favorite pictures is a drawing grandson Tucker made then he was about five years old. We’d just come back from a pontoon boat ride on a windy morning, a ride shortened because Tucker got scared of how the boat rocked on the whitecapping waves. The drawing shows the boat riding on the tips of waves that look like knife blades. “Danger!” he wrote above an arrow pointed at the waves, and next to the classic triangular trouble sign with the exclamation point in the middle.
Memories of the boys come back now as they enter adolescence (Tucker 14 and Perrin 12) and as we anticipate a visit from their entire family this month. They’re not innocent children anymore, and we wonder how long they’ll retain their fascination with Birch Lake and its and rituals. I remember Perrin, at age three or so, minutes after arrival at our lake house, looking up to me earnestly and asking, “Grampa, can I have a fishing rod?” I got the boys’ “Snoopy rods” out of the closet, and soon both boys were practice-casting from our deck onto the grass below.
A photo I treasure shows Perrin, around age six, kneeling on the lake ice, wearing a blue snowsuit and a woolen hat in the shape of a wolf’s head. Before him lies a large crappie he had just caught. A few years ago, while perch fishing, Tucker and I observed an eagle, first circling overhead, then trying to light at the top of a dead birch tree, the branch it chose snapping off on the first two attempts. Tucker laughed out loud.
On a road trip to the Rainbow Falls dam, Noelle and I hiked the boys down to the bank near where the water roared through the sluice gate. Perrin spotted an older man sitting on a lawn chair fishing. He had long gray-black hair and a bushy gray beard; he wore tattered jeans and a black T-shirt whose sleeves didn’t cover his tattoos. “Is that a pirate?” Perrin asked.
Both boys loved the lake’s loons. Once during a family pontoon cruise we spotted three loons a couple hundred yards away. As a breeze pushed us slowly, silently toward them, the boys imitated a loon’s wail: Ooooooooo. Oooooooo. Eventually we encroached on the loons’ space; they submerged and departed. To this day, the boys believe they called those loons in.
One evening a large musky took a walleye I was reeling in. I worked it right up to the boatside, and the boys got to see it clearly before it dropped its prey and darted off. Those are some of my memories; I have enough to fill a book or two. I wonder, as they grow and teenage interests intervene, what the Tucker and Perrin will remember. Maybe Grampa’s fish-and-potato-pancake breakfasts, or the high-speed sled rides on the slick packed-snow slope on the end of our private road.
Perhaps it’s the rainy-day art projects with the markers, paint sets and other supplies Gramma always had on hand. Or the long, slow summer-afternoon cruises around the lake’s perimeter, soda pops and snacks on board, the boys taking Grampa-supervised turns at the helm, playing with the anchor winch, honking the horn. Surely their cranial hard drives are filling with memories. I’m grateful to have my remaining years to give them some more.