Do you live on your lake? Or own a cottage that you visit
for weekends and vacations? Or rent a cabin you come back to for a week, year
after year? Your status no doubt affects the way you look at your lake and lake
life.
Right now it’s Labor Day weekend, the last big hurrah for
the part-timers here at Birch Lake near Harshaw, Wisconsin. Of 80 or so places
on our lake, maybe 10 are full-time homes, the rest weekend and vacation
retreats. This weekend, everyone is here. Yesterday cars, pickups and SUVs streamed down the private
road on which we live (“streamed” being a relative term, perhaps eight or 10
vehicles last afternoon and evening, which means twice as many vehicles as
there are cottages on the road between our place and the dead end).
We used to be cabin renters. Now we live here full-time. And
the change in our perspective is dramatic. Before, we might have been among
those weekenders, arriving on Friday night after work, the car crammed with
kids, dog, duffel bags, water toys, fishing gear, books, groceries, all of us
looking forward to a few days on the water, the last few days before we face a
long winter. Leaving on Monday would mean facing the reality of not seeking
this lake again for several months.
Now, while glad to see our (part-time) neighbors and wanting
to get to know them better, we also see this weekend as the last spell of noise
before the lake quiets down. In the evenings there will be lakefront parties,
music throbbing from outdoor speakers, fires crackling. After dark there will
be fireworks (not the organized, authorized kind, but explosions and flashes
from various spontaneous private displays).
If the weather is warm (and it appears that will be the
case), there will be speedboats, JetSkis and water skiers out much of the day,
maybe even up to sunset and beyond, which means into the prime fishing hours.
And as for that, I’ll have more competition for the prime fishing spots on the
reef along the lake’s northeast shore.
All this, too, is relative, since even at its busiest our
little 180-acre lake is pretty sedate, not at all like the lakes in the
epicenter of the tourist town of Minocqua a dozen or so miles north. Still,
while before we would have wanted this three-day weekend to last, now in large
part we’ll be glad when it’s over, because then the lake will truly quiet. When
summer has gone, when people have used up their vacations, when the kids are
back in school, there’s almost no one up here. We have the lake essentially to
ourselves.
There are those who envy us. At the lake association picnic
last month, when we told neighbors we had moved here, the usual response was,
“You’re lucky.” For the most part it seems, those with lake places who do not
live here wish they did, and hope one day they will. We have come face to face
with the reality of full-time Northwoods life, and I am not yet certain how, in
the long run, we will like it.
I still work for a living (though now just four days a week,
not five). And life as a full-time resident is far different from life as a
tourist. You move, and you discover that, up here, there are still only 24
hours in a day – imagine that! So the hiking, biking, fishing, car touring,
shopping (my wife’s favorite) and all the fun still have to fit in around work,
exercising, cooking, cleaning, and work around the property (which for us no
longer includes mowing lawn). To paraphrase an old saying: Before moving north,
cut wood and carry water. After moving north, cut wood and carry water (and
move lots of snow).
So we will see how all this plays out. Right now we do feel
lucky, especially with autumn coming, the bracing cool days, the spectacular
color of the oaks and maples on our place, around the lake, and down every road
– and the wonderful thought of not having to take leave, with all the pain that
once entailed. We’ll enjoy it now and not worry too much about whether, two or
five or ten years from now, we will still feel lucky.
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