I live near a lake now and often go there to stand on the shore and just look at it. It's a small lake, but I can't tell that from my sandy cove. At those moments, that lake is my whole blue and green world. I find myself silently singing an old Girl Scout song about asking peace of a river and breathing more deeply than I can anywhere else. My last home was near the ocean, another across from a river. I've wondered why it's the lake that brings me peace.
When I was a kid — a pre-baby dyke — my parents started taking two-week vacations on a lake in New Hampshire. The lake, Winnipesaukee, was an eight-hour drive from New York City, longer when you figured in the cat and I getting car sick, picking up a passel of relatives north of Boston and then a whole cooked turkey from a venerated institution called Harrows in North Reading, Massachusetts. The trunk would be too full and someone would hold the turkey on her lap, its smell filling the old green Hudson with promise the rest of the way north.
Days at the lake were lazy, but full. There was time to swim and fish and tootle around the water in a rented aluminum boat with a 1.5 horsepower motor. And to read, read, read to my heart's content. In the mornings, part of my family might walk to the village where I'd get my allotment of penny candy for the day. At night we'd walk to the ice cream place down a leafy road by the lake and I'd crunch the powerful cracked peppermint candies in my pink ice cream. Little did I know these days and nights with my family were, even with personalities clashing and money worries (it cost $200 for a week for a "lodge" that slept 12) and conflicting needs and too much drinking, as idyllic a time as I was to experience in my life.
Looking at pictures of little Lee at the lake, I am astonished that my mother let me carry on like that. There's one shot of a skinny, pre-pubescent girl with short hair, dressed in a loose flannel shirt with sleeves rolled high up her arms, muscle-shirt style. Dungarees, as they were called then, and white sneakers finish the ensemble. The only difference between that little girl and the dyke of today, besides a few years and pounds and updated glasses, is the candy cigarette hanging from the side of my mouth in the picture. Oh — and the fact that, back then, I'd never even heard of lesbians, though clearly I was a lesbian child.
In another picture, I'm on some rocks that jut into the lake, in shorts and a polo shirt, holding up the fish I caught. One day, as I fished from those rocks, a little boy scrambled out to me and asked, to my great embarrassment, "Are you a tomboy?" I was still too innocent to understand that this implied that jaded adults were questioning my gender and my sexuality, my androgynous James Dean style.
My annual idyll continued undisturbed. In other pictures, my family even looked as if they might be getting a puzzled kick out of me. Obviously, anything went up at the lake. I got to try out the little butch in me. It would have been silly, after all, to force me into a dress or to take off my beloved sailor hat when I was thigh-deep in water wading to pull the boat to shore for my mother. Or while I was baiting hooks or building trails through the fragrant pine needle ground cover. At the lake, magically, it was okay to be me.
That's where my present sense of peace comes from when I visit the little lake near my home. Those vacations were the only time I was truly comfortable and happy, because my family let me be myself. I could breathe. Later, when I was a counselor at a Girl Scout camp on another lake, I sang, sang like I could, like I knew the words to life that everyone else seemed to have by heart.
The last two years that I went up to the lake with my family, it was too late. I was out and had learned to hide myself as best I could. They were, by then, expecting me to act like the young lady I could never be. I visited the campground post office daily, before anyone else could beat me to it, to pick up love letters from my girlfriend, and then I’d read them in a secret grove of trees and stash them away from the eyes of my family. Being myself meant hiding.
I stopped going to the lake the summer I was 17. Apparently, I left my sense of peace there, left behind my family and my innocent, forbidden self. Now, visiting this little Pacific Northwest lake, I feel rusted parts of myself clunk back into place where they're starting to move freely again, oiled by the everyday love of my girl and the decades of lessons that led me back to a place of peace.
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Lee Lynch is the author of eleven books including The Swashbuckler and the Morton River Valley Trilogy. She lives on the Oregon Coast, and comes from a New England family.