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It’s a damp, cool morning with a heavy misty fog hanging over the lake. As I sit at my favorite bench on the shoreline, I hear loud screams and laughter coming from the children’s camp pier nearby. It takes me back many years to my own experiences on that pier as a camper.

Every one had to pass a swimming test at the beginning of each summer and invariably, because it was early June in Western NY it would be chilly and rainy. The lake looked gray-black and very, very cold.
We would be lined up on the dock, a bunch of skinny little kids covered with goose bumps, wiggling and laughing and dreading having to jump into the water. We would all beg to do something else until the teenage counselors would finally yell, one…..two…..three …and gleefully shove all of us in.

Oh how I hated that! At that age I was somewhat afraid of the water, especially in lakes where I couldn’t see the bottom. And in this lake, a perennial seaweed of sorts grew on the bottom that would tangle around my feet and ankles. Nothing could be creepier! Who knew what else lurked down there?

My only motivation to do this was that once I proved that I could swim to the raft and back, I could graduate up to the canoeing and sailing lessons that I loved. So we would all take off swimming, in any fashion we could, to finish the test and climb out with our blue lips, shivering all over.

It was a rite of passage every summer, and a bunch of kids learned the lesson that it’s better to just get the bad things over with so that you can go on to the good stuff. An important lesson at a young age.
Now I just go straight to the sailing part on sunny days when the twinkling lake light draws me in willingly. I can’t remember the last time I swam to that raft…..