Towing the Line

by Christine Adams Beckett

Mabel Taylor Adams, who loved the lake, March 1908

To beat the suburban Hartford heat in the summertime, my parents would bring my siblings and me to Lake Waramaug in Connecticut. There, in a charming cottage that was once a boat club, we would pass the long, hot days with all the expected lakeside diversions: swimming, boating, water skiing. The house itself was an inherited treasure from my paternal grandmother, Mabel Taylor Adams, who spent her own girlhood summers on the lake, albeit a tad further South on West Shore Road. There her father, Henry Taylor, had his own cottage where he brought Grandmother Mabel and her siblings Kenneth and Pearl for airings as early as 1890, a relief from the more convenient hubbub that was New Milford, Connecticut.

Now that I am a parent myself, I am delighted to be able to share this treasured place with my own three children. We travel a bit further in 2013 to beat the heat of Montclair New Jersey, about one hundred miles, or two and a quarter hours door-to-door if we don't stop at Stew Leonard's or the Northville Market for sustenance on the way. The car is as packed as uncomfortably as I remember it to be in 1975: with a gaggle of children, bags, necessities, family pets. As a child myself, I forgot all the discomfort of a longish ride once the familiar landmarks passed our car windows: Grandpa Snazzy's Antikew Shop ( I didn't know how to pronounce it then), Mt Tom State Park, the turn off onto Route 45 and the features of a then rather honky-tonk New Preston village: Dowler's Garage, Krasselt's Store, The Washington Supply, the Boy's Club in the Pavilion Hall, where my father boasted he used to play a pretty mean game of basketball with his pal Harry Ericson.

Our dog Spot, gone 30 years now, used to practically convulse when his keen canine senses took in the familiarity. He would whine with excitement once we hit the foot of the lake where Ritchie's Pizza and the Washington Town Beach were. We children did, too, claiming bragging rights in advance: "I'm going to be the first one into the lake! Dad, Will you take me skiing / aquaplaning first?"

Today New Preston Village is all swank: J Seitz, New Preston Kitchen Works, several upscale antique shops peddling occasional tables that cost exponentially more than my first car. There is a lovely Mediterranean eatery, Oliva's, but no more pizza place on the foot of the lake. The feel of the place is decidedly sleepier, more sophisticated and frankly safer. Somehow the foot of the lake and the much more fashionable surroundings still elicit the same excitement in my children.

"When can we go to the bait shop, mom?"

"I hope Grandma still has that copy of Island of the Blue Dolphins in the sleeping loft."

Even the two year-old: "There's the lake, Mama!"

The hound whines when he sees the Route 45 turn-off.

Even at mid life, as the weather turns warmer in Montclair and the trees are in full bloom, I start to feel that girlhood excitement of the changing season. Memorial Day is imminent as is the summer season on the Lake. I have already made my preliminary Memorial Day plans.

We commemorated Memorial Day last year with a cocktail party at a neighbor's house, a long-time friend whose son and I were playmates decades ago. We toasted the start of summer on the same swath of green lawn at the lakeside where we once played wiffle ball with other neighborhood kids, some of whom were also in attendance this weekend. I was scolded in days of old by the hostess for being careless. I had an annoying, dangerous, but uncontrollable habit of flinging the bat in a yards-long, arc behind me after I made a hit and transitioned myself to make it to first base before anyone could tag me out. I must have flung the bat at mach speed three times, nearly decapitating poor Susie Catcher twice before the look of exasperation in many faces made it clear that I had seen my last turn at bat.

Thankfully they didn't hold a grudge and included me at Bingo night, movie night, even a photo shoot for a children's book featuring many of us summer neighbors. Sunburned, freckled, barefooted and constantly in a wet swimsuit is how I spent my childhood summers. It was sublime even without the sweet peaches, tomatoes and corn on the cob that needed neither butter nor salt from a roadside stand on Route 202. How much things have changed for a mother who still feels like playing wiffle ball, until I realized the Pitcher, visiting from New York for the long holiday weekend had a darling baby under his own arm, unable to throw a decent curveball. I hovered over my own two year-old who wanted to swim dressed in her cotton sundress. I let her. I let all of my children swim with their clothes on as the Pitcher, still standing there with his baby in a football hold, observing my happy, wet children simply said: "Their Adams is showing..."

Yes, I suppose we Adamses might have seemed impulsive from an outsider's perspective. Perhaps we were loud and too boisterous to a transitioning crowd of summer inhabitants on a lake that always had subtle style, big beauty, long-term appeal, and the ability to get under your skin and fester there like a delightful disease: an addiction of good quality.

The responsibility of its upkeep and care is slowly passing from one generation to the next. We agree that its preservation is vital to the next generation who will swim here, and to bring their children here to cool in the breezes and waters, occasionally warm on its rocks and learn to recognize one of God's natural gifts. The appreciation of that gift just illuminates another: family, both blood and extended, connected by a common body of water.