There are many ways to spend a summer vacation. As a kid, I spent several summers at a sleep away camp. There were a couple of years of daily Little League baseball. There was a trip to Nantucket. The memories from these summers are still really strong.
However, by far the most profound memories of summer for me have to do with the two summers my family spent in a ramshackle cottage on Lake Champlain, down a long dirt road off Route 9 near the town of Keeseville, NY, so hard to find that when my father wrote a piece about it for the New York Times Travel Section, readers who got lost accused him of making it up.
My mother, brother, two sisters and our babysitter Elsie Higgins moved up there from our home in Warrensburgin early July and stayed for two months, My father would come up on Thursday night and go back to Warrensburg on Monday morning.
We slept on a screened-in porch on stilts six feet off the sand of the beach that seemed to stretch off forever in either direction, falling asleep to the sound of moths banging against the screen mixed with the whisper of waves lapping the sand.
Lake Champlain, which is famous for it's rocky unwelcoming shorelines and clifflike drop-offs, was incredibly calm and shallow here. I could walk out 50 or 75 yards on the soft sand and the water would barely come up tpo my thigh.
The house satt on the beach, the sand was our front lawn. Our nearest neighbor was a quarter mile away.
It seemed like the sun shone every day. At night I would fall asleep reading the swollen and sun-faded Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magzines someone had left there in summers past.
I remember thinking to myself that that time, that place was the best time and place I would ever experience.
The Playlist:
1. Live With The Seasons - Teenage Fanclub
2. Summerlong - CFCF
3. Fourth Of July - Aimee Mann
4. After the Fireworks We Walked to the Rope Swing - Sumner Mckane
5. Wedding Day - Alejandro Escovedo
6. Gauzy Dress In The Sun - Richard Buckner
7. Popsicle Orange - The Sorcerer
8. Strawberries - Asobi Seksu
9. Blue Canoe - Blue Mountain
10. On A White Lake, Near A Green Mountain - M83
11. Hidden Lakes - Shearwater
12. Tianchi Lake - The Mountain Goats
13. Endless Sunset - Delorean
14. Nightswimming - R.E.M.
15. I Just Want to See You Underwater - Here We Go Magic
16. Moon River - Bill Frisell
Summer On the Lake Mix
