The Lake

"The lake" is an interesting place if you’ve never been. (I like how people always refer to going to "the lake" regardless of where they are and where they’re going. It’s not "a lake" or "Lake [name]" -- it’s just "the lake." Sort of like "the grocery store" or "the mall" or "the drug dealer." You get me.) If you’ve never been to the lake, you’re missing out on getting to miss out on life.

Yes, you read that correctly. See, when you’re at the lake, you’re not just geographically removing yourself from your typical life; what subsequently, inevitably occurs is the mental and emotional detachment from life itself. Your workplace doesn’t matter, your workload doesn’t matter. Your unopened e-mails, your unreplied-to e-mails, your opened-but-saved-as-new e-mails all don’t matter. The world wide web doesn’t matter, the television set doesn’t matter, the gruesome news headlines don’t matter. Politics, conflicts, utility bills, and personal finances don’t matter. Life for all you know in that moment of retreat doesn’t exist beyond the sandy, treed coastlines of that lake water.

Also, cleanliness doesn’t matter. Hygiene? Minimal. Sanitation? Laughable. Manners and societal cues of civilized responses are not simply tabled but hidden away and forgotten. Burps and farts are the rest of the world’s sneezes and coughs -- just bodily reactions that require emission, not suffocation. And when nature calls, you relieve yourself on nature’s mother. (Take that, you old hag!)

Adding to the inimitable temperament of the lake is its clientele. Quite different from the beach, let me just say. The beach is very showy, like everyone walking the sands is on parade. Lots of scantily clad men and women, the essentials barely covered, conveniently allowing the bounciest of corporal protrusions to bob and sway to and fro with every rigid footstep in loose sand and every bump of the beach ball. It’s a very sexy scene.

"Sexy," on the other hand, may very well be the last word that comes to mind directly after "lake." I think that’s because the attitude at the lake is a "come as you are" mindset, while the beach requests that you "come as you imagine yourself to be -- also, please suck that gut in." The lake requires zero self-maintenance -- which for many is the attraction. It’s the place where those flowery one-pieces that resemble a picnic tablecloth go to retire on the backside of a woman who hasn’t bathed since the weekend began. If the beach is a boisterous, spotlighted stage, the lake is its disheveled backstage janitor’s closet.

That’s not at all to suggest the lake lacks beauty and amicability. Quite contrarily, it effuses these things, with a splash of serenity. How do you think it found its way into so many Bob Ross paintings?

So, I’m not demeaning the lake one bit -- it’s just a different world out there. Matter of fact, its primitive nature is partially, if not wholly, appealing. That is its selling point.

The lake just doesn’t care to impress you. Neither does that scruffy man out on his pontoon with his belly hanging over his camo cutoffs and his free hand mindlessly scratching himself.