Tell me, is there anything as peaceful or relaxing as a house on the lake? To look out the window and see the calm water? To sleep in without the interruption of texting or phone calls? To lie in the hammock on the deck and feel the cool breeze? To hear the crowing of the rooster in the forest?
My husband and his brother in law recently purchased an older lakefront house at an absurdly low price, without the blessing of either my sister-in-law or me. While that is certainly an issue for more than one session of marital counseling, the fact remains that we are now part owners of a lake house, which means that occasionally, when we have nothing better to do (and believe me, I always try to find something better to do), we tootle down the interstate and spend a day at the lake. Our house is rundown and dated compared to the rest of the houses on the street, which are occupied full time by their owners. For us, it’s an investment/recreational property, so we are only there on the weekends, if at all.
My husband and his brother in law have spent the better part of six months slowly, and I do mean slowly, renovating the house, mostly without the assistance of professional craftsman. They have installed the hardwood floors, tiled the bathroom shower stall, and even hung light fixtures and window treatments. It is coming together, and in an effort to be civil, I occasionally go out to the house to see what needs doing and provide lunch and make sure our children don’t drown.
The truth is, I don’t like lakes. I grew up a beach person, and I am still a beach person. I like sand and salty water and waves and sitting under an umbrella to read a book and finding shells and spotting dolphins breaching in the distance. I like seagulls begging for crackers and sea oats and long walks with my bare inner thighs rubbing together. When it comes to the beach, I even like the patently unlikable parts.
But the lake? Well, I don’t like any of that business. The way it goes from twelve feet deep to sixty feet deep. How the water smells and feels and if you get any up your nose or down your windpipe, chances are good a brain-eating bacterium has just entered your bloodstream. And don’t get me started on the fish. You can’t even tell them apart; they all look the same and none of them are going to be a shark or a jellyfish or anything even remotely interesting or edible. Everything is slimy, and you have to wear life jackets, and did I mention snakes? Plus it’s boring. Get in the boat, ride around, jump out, tread water, sit on a tube, repeat. You can’t even go crabbing, and I am allergic to crabs!
One thing, however, does make the lake house worthy of the occasional visit, and that is the potential for wildlife. I am always optimistic that I will see deer when there, although it has yet to happen for me. Last time my husband took our daughters, they saw a deer swimming across the lake. A deer, swimming! Who knew they even knew how to swim? It’s not like he was doing the breaststroke, but he was in fact deer paddling his way from one shore to the other. Instead, I have seen woodpeckers, which are ordinary birds with extraordinary names, and hawks, and more than a handful of frogs. And I have seen the rooster.
Our lake house neighbors have a rooster that patrols their yard. He was a gift from some friends of theirs who raise chickens, but a coop only needs so many roosters, and he was a surplus rooster, so the neighbors took him to the lake as a pet. Let me tell you, there is nothing quite as odd as walking down a path to the dock and having a rooster, feathered ass and coxcomb waving in the breeze, cross your path. He has taken it upon himself to patrol not only his owner’s property, but ours as well, so you never know where he will pop up until you hear the tell-tale crowing.
One time, when we took some of our daughters’ friends with us to the lake, the rooster decided to join us on the dock. Well, he did need a little coaxing. The girls were both delighted and terrified to see him strut down the path, and I foolishly enticed him to walk onto the dock by making a trail of pumpernickel pretzels on the ground. It turns out that roosters like pumpernickel pretzels as much as chicken feed and worms and bugs, and before we knew it, he was all the way on the floating dock, high stepping and turning his head sideways in that weird way that chickens do. I thought if we were lucky, we could get him all the way on the boat, then maybe abandon him on the shore of another part of the lake so we didn't have to worry anymore about him attacking anyone near the house.
My husband came down to join us and chastised us for encouraging the rooster to strut on the dock, but I mommed up and admitted I was the one who got him there by feeding him pretzels. Really, pumpernickel pretzels are tasty, so it was a shame when my husband picked up the stray ones and threw them in the water, where they instantly grew waterlogged and sank before the ugly boring fish could even nibble them.
The rooster roaming on the dock and in the woods is the only good part of the rooster. The bad part is four in the morning, when the loud crowing starts. It’s one thing to hear a rooster crow on the Mattel See N Say, but it’s quite another when you are trying to relax at the lake. And this rooster seems to think he is more like a church bell or a grandfather clock; on the hour, every hour, he cock a doodle doos loudly and annoyingly. It’s quaint for one night, but if I lived there full time, that rooster would not.
My brother in law reported that the neighbors recently invested in some hens of their own to give that rooster something better to do than nose his way around the neighborhood, waking everyone up and snacking on pumpernickel pretzels. Maybe next time I go to the lake, I can get some fresh cage-free eggs to go with my four A.M. wake up call. If I’m going to be up that early, I might as well make an omelet.
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