On my 21st summer, I set out north and embarked on a week of leisure and adventures in a sacred place, one of royal denominations. The Queen of American Lakes, or Lake George, where millions of New Yorkers pilgrimage to during the summer months.
It is a vacation spot for all except the year-rounders pushing towel carts in motel hallways or ice cream-scooping 16-year-olds. It is a place I had been to once before as a child with my family but never as a young adult.
My time there was one of das unheimliche — Freud’s uncanny. Places felt familiar but were not. Storefronts swapped from what I remembered and the sidewalks smaller. Had they shrunk, or had I grown? Most jarring of all: an Auntie Annie’s next to the House of Frankenstein Wax Museum and not the Pizza Hut from my childhood memory.
But the gift shop sprinted into for safety when Frankenstein lumbered out and petrified me and my cousins remained unchanged. I had been here before but not quite. The familiar had indeed become strange. I felt my past and present folding in: the child I was collapsing into the woman I am becoming.
I did not return with my family but rather with another. My friend Bella brought me as her plus-one, and I was a fresh face amidst the three families who had been coming to Lake George together for two decades. There was a group of young people Bella grew up with, and all of us college-aged or post-grad.
Before arriving, Bella told me about the various faces brought along over the years. A graveyard of ex-boyfriends and girlfriends, old friends no longer on speaking terms — some remembered more fondly than others, and some who had stuck: a boyfriend of eight years now considered part of the family, a girlfriend here for the second time.
They were so casual about it: opening their cabins to lovers and friends. I had only known Bella since January, and here I was for seven days sharing a room with her, her sister, and her sister’s boyfriend.
We stayed at Twin Birches, a WASPY resort where everyone was white and labradors laid under American flags flown high on cabin porches. Bella explained to me how prior guests get cabin reservation priority for the same time and cabin each year. Vacant spots are rare, which means if you grew up going to the Twin Birches like Bella did, your cabin neighbors have watched you mature from rugrat to adult.
The first day, we arrived in the late afternoon at our Cabin No. 15. Inside the ligneous interior, Bella’s mother Diane stocked the cabinets with bagels, chips, graham crackers, and marshmallows. Every expense and need she met: shampoo in the showers, sunscreen on the kitchen table, and sanitary products in the bathroom. When I hugged her and met her for the first time, I had no idea of her unbounded generosity and how she would pay for me on the trip. Every meal I ate, every putt I swung in minigolf, she paid for. For the week, Diane had adopted me.
We walked out of the resort and across the street, to the Twin Birches’ private lakefront. As I dipped my toes into the deep blue of the lake, a boy my age would use an AK-47 to send streaks of deep crimson from Donald Trump’s ear, down to his thin mouth like smudged lipstick. He killed one person and wounded two others before a Secret Service member killed him 400 miles away from where I watched the lake ripple around my feet. Back at the cabin, I looked at the photo taken when the bullet grazed Trump’s ear. But then Bella handed me a bag of giant marshmallows to roast s’mores, and the assassination attempt slipped my mind over the fire’s steam that travelled above my head to the red, white, and blue flags swaying above the cabins.
Most of our days in Lake George were spent like this: wake up, chug coffee and lounge on the sky deck at the lakefront. Sloth and gluttony not frowned upon but encouraged — no, expected. Other Twin Birches residents got the memo. Beer-bellied men smoked cigarettes and lined empty Bud Lights on the deck where they waded in water. It was both a shameless and impressive display of their drinking abilities. Women sat in flamingo pool floaties with White Claws. A sunburnt man with “Irish Pride” tattooed in Gaelic lettering on each forearm crushed cans with his sausage fingers. A wedding venue stood next to the lakefront, where some sunsets we watched couples marry and judged bridesmaid dresses in our bikinis.
It felt strange to have no responsibilities, no expectations for the entire week. All there was to do was enjoy myself. Wait for the moms to cook meals. Take siestas. Drink Diet Cokes. Swim and go get some ice cream. But for all my relaxation, the sense of the past folding down into the present would not evade me — leaving a sharp edge of unease to my idleness.
Every day I watched what I imagined as the manifestation of childhood memories around me: a group of blonde-headed boys fighting over basketball, a father catching lightning bugs in his big hands for his daughter. I saw myself in each child running around as the sun went down, daring each other to do handstands and eating more ice cream than their tiny stomachs could handle.
I often thought of my cousins, who I came to Lake George with last. They defined my coming of age via the painful struggle to fit in amongst them. I grew up in the city, where I got along better with adults than kids my age and slept with the books I loved under my pillow. They grew up in Long Island as stars of their middle school sports teams and excelled at suburbia misadventure. Now older at Lake George, I reckoned with how I was once the child here, making memories but suffering the pain of not being accepted as I was. Flashbacks to childhood loserdom still biting like a bullied dog.
Often at dinner or over ice cream with the group, I went taciturn. The times for sitting down and stuffing our faces were the hardest to fit into a group of people who knew each other their entire lives. For all their kindness, I was an outsider, and that was just reality. There was the constant push and pull of my mind: I could be myself in front of my friend’s family more than I could ever be in front of my own, but I felt left out. I do not fit in with my family, and I do not fit in here. I understood why people start families of their own more than I had ever before — to belong.
In between my inner lamentations, I tanned until I looked healthy and golden and felt so with each deep breath I took before bursting under the lake water. Fresh blood pumped through my body as I crashed my arms through the indigo water, clear and sparkling like the sun’s shine filled it with diamonds. When I did not swim, fat waterdrops from my wet hair dropped onto the copy of “Lonesome Dove” I read. I felt so alive I practically vibrated with my body vigorous and spirit high due to my time outside.
Countless boats helmed by men with silver hair and aviators went by and honked in greeting whenever they revved past another, but the largest boat — a double-decker steamboat from the 1960s dubbed the “Minne-Ha-Ha” — put them all to shame. Pay $20 for a tour, and you could wave at Twin Birches guests lying at the lake, or at me ignoring you for my book. It passed us every hour, and a worker would lay down on its horn to send out a booming honk. I came to know its firetruck-red paddlewheel churning water like a familiar friend. A drawing of Indian feathers adorned the steamboat’s name on its side, next to the furious flapping of an American flag. “Minne-Ha-Ha” means waterfall in the Dakota language because like everything in America, American Indians first knew the beauty of Lake George. They called it “Andia-ta-roc-te”: “Lake that shuts itself in.”
Most nights, Diane bought us ice cream at a shop called Martha’s Dandee Creme. Located across from Six Flags Great Escape Lodge, Martha’s is family owned and nearly eight decades old. A large rooster sat on top of its fluorescent sign, welcoming me to choose which long line I wanted to wait in for a cone. The place bustled each night, with high-schoolers running around the back, taking ice cream orders and handing back perfect cones of soft serve swirls. Tip jars advertised as college savings glowed under each booth’s neon lights, and splattered ice cream and sprinkles stains decorated the floor. All types of different crowds enjoyed Martha’s, whether it be 20-somethings hitting disposable vapes between licks of vanilla, or children using their tongues to clean melted chocolate ice cream from their arms.
We devoured our ice cream on picnic tables, where nearby moths flicked in and out of motel lamplights. Six Flags workers from out of the country lived there, with Martha’s as their backyard during the summer operation months. As I ate my ice cream, I watched them go in and out of lonely-looking rooms or sit on fold-out chairs with the moths dancing above their heads.
Martha’s ice cream flavors change every couple of days, but I felt wary of venturing outside of my ice cream comfort zone to options like Blueberry and PeanutButter Chocolate Chip. Although I would order a kiddie size, I struggled to ever finish my cup. Martha’s does not skimp; the portions are huge. An unsuspecting customer would order a large ice cream cone and be handed a sugary behemoth bigger than his head.
If the innocence of childhood surrounded me at Twin Birches, it was clear to me I had transitioned into the world of experience alongside Bella and the others our age.
Once the parents retired to sit around a fire, we supplemented our bowls of ice cream with that of a different kind and headed to the largest cabin to get loud and rowdy. Most nights we played the party game “One Night Ultimate Werewolf.” Each player is dealt a secret role via cards with the goal to determine who the werewolf is. A narrator from the game’s phone app instructed us to close our eyes, then open them as each player “wakes up” for their turn, and we giggled over cups of apple juice and tequila with our heads in our hands, eyes squeezed shut. For all my awareness of the group’s long history and each inside joke I did not get, I had no qualms at pointing fingers and making loud accusations once someone busted out the Werewolf deck.
One night, a magnificent storm swept through Lake George. Tornado warning, and then a blackout at Twin Birches. The perfect setting for Werewolf. After several rounds, we told ghost stories with our faces shimmering in and out of the lantern’s glow and lightning bolts crashing from the clouds.
Some nights we headed to the tennis courts, where I stretched my spine to meet the cool, flat slab of the court’s surface and breathe towards the stars, so bright and beautiful I seldom dared to blink. I never saw the stars growing up in New York City, never forced to face how minute I am. But on the tennis courts and under the sky, I felt small in the most delicious way, watching the billions of burning flickers of light and enjoying the nighttime summer air, cool and warm at once.
We were grown children free with the autonomy of young adulthood, swimming in the lake all day with neon goggles that left a mark behind and going out of breath from exploring the water. After stuffing our bellies with ice cream, we played minigolf at Goony Golf, where animatronic dinosaurs and polar bears creaked with buffered movements over us trying to make hole-in-ones. Over BBQ dinner, we debated having to sweat mayonnaise or eat it for the rest of one’s life, or whether we would grow an extra arm or an extra leg.
At the end of the trip, I wrote Diane a letter of gratitude for being a member of her family for the week. Though I could not escape the strange collision of my childhood self with who I am now, the kindness and generosity Bella’s family showed to me lingers stronger than the sensations of my nostalgia.
Lake George is a place rooted in childhood memories, where my past pains and what I have lost to become who I am now is heightened. I understand I am both past and present versions of myself at once, both reaching toward the woman I will become.
–Aug. 15, 2024–
