The Lake

When I was in the fourth grade my mother went back to work. My parents arranged for our after school care to be provided by the parents of Harvey Jr. and Gary. Gary was my age; Harvey Jr. was my sister’s. Neither my sister nor I were particularly friendly with these boys.  They just happened to be in our classes.

Every school day we would walk to Gary and Harvey’s home.  This wasn’t an ordinary Silver Lake home, it WAS Silver Lake. The boys’ dad was the caretaker of Silver Lake Reservoir and they lived in a compound within the fence.  It was like living in a private park.  Adventures abounded.

One day after school. we ventured into the laboratory that tested the reservoir water. The scientist, surrounded by test tubes and charts, and having plenty of free time on his hands, asked our names and spelling. He wrote each name with a thick leaded pencil onto strips of paper. Then he weighted our names on a small scale.  Until then, and never since, was I aware that a name could weigh something.  Unless it’s something like Hitler. 

A regular duty of the caretaker was to keep ducks from establishing a home on the lake. Harvey Sr. would put us in the motorboat and go out on the lake to shoot ducks.  Then we would have to pick them out of the water so they wouldn’t pollute it.  The small boat was awash with blood and feathers, and this was perhaps the grossest thing I had ever seen up to that point. And I think the family even ate the ducks.

It was quite a change being in a family that had boys.  There were older brothers as well. And a teenaged daughter whose room I snooped through when I was home from school with some ailment; the thrill of my paper dolls having waned. I learned odd things like how to hone an axe on a grindstone, how to ride a boys bike with gears and that inexplicable bar that hits your crotch, and that the olives on the tree in the yard were nothing like the Lindsey ones we ate at my house. I learned how to insert caps into guns and to love the smell of the gunpowder.  And I stole my first thing at the lake too.  Harvey Jr. wore a rabbit’s foot chained to the belt loop of his Levis.  Under the guise of wrestling, I got him down, unclipped it and he was never the wiser.  I still feel guilty.  And now that I think about it, a rabbit’s foot was almost as gross as the bloody ducks.