When I got off of the bus, my mom and
Kari Jo were there to meet me. I loved seeing Kari Jo, I knew I was home. So I
jumped from dances, swimming pools and grand pianos to a barefoot, river
swimming, peach picking girl. That would turn out to be the best summer I ever
had.
The
Lake
My grandparents had moved about thirty miles
from where we usually lived, to a little cabin community at “The Grand Lake of
the Cherokees” It was like a little summer place, but it was on a big private
farm. There were cattle everywhere; they would come up to the lake every night
and every morning. It never mattered where we lived as long as I was with Grandpa
and Grandma. It’s a good thing that I’m not picky, because my grandparents were
living in a little thirty foot trailer and my mom and the kids were staying in
a metal storage shed. I swear to god, a ten by ten foot, tin, storage shed. All
they did was sleep in it. It had mattresses on the floor and clothes in the
corner. The rest of the time they were down at my grandparent’s trailer. All of
the adults were almost always sitting outside by the trailer and all of the
kids were always in the lake. The only time any of us were inside, was to cook
or go to the bathroom. We couldn’t drink the water that came out of the tap,
because it was sulfur water, and it stunk like rotten eggs. So we went and
carried fresh water from the pump house, at least once a day. It drew from a
natural spring. That was the best and coldest water I have ever tasted. Every
cabin used it because all of the running water there was sulfur.
When I got
there, my mom and the kids had been there for ten days or better and had
settled into this existence. But there was no room for me in that shed and I
didn’t want to be there anyway. I wanted to be with Kari Jo. There wasn’t
enough room for me in their trailer and it was to hot to sleep in there anyway.
So my grandpa put Kari Jo and me in sleeping bags in the back of the pick up
truck. And that is where I slept for three months. I didn’t care, I was happy
to be there. There was this “big” bull named “bullet” and more than once, I
would wake up to him putting his nose over the bed of the truck and licking my
face. The first time it happened, he scared me so bad I screamed, but after
that, if I woke up and if he wasn’t somewhere right around there, I worried
about him. That is the summer I grew up.
When I was
fourteen, I was built like I was twenty. I definitely could fill out my mother’s
bathing suit and there were boys at the lake. Kari Jo and I both grew up that
summer. It was the summer of a lifetime. We had friends our age and the other
kids did as well. We had so much fun. We practically lived in that lake. We
played hide and go seek, swimming up under the docks. They were built out of
wood, and there were air pockets up under there, and we would swim up under
these joists and we could breathe in these air pockets in between the joists of
the docks. Once I was under one of these docks hiding, I went to push off, “by
putting my foot on the board and pushing off” and a snake went right across my
foot. Now when I think of that it gives me the shivers. I probably wouldn’t
even get in that lake today. But that summer, I was invincible, young, pretty
and free.
Some of the
cabins sat right on the lake and some sat on the other side of the dirt road
that ran up between them, but none of them had a bad view. Today, the little
place where we stayed that summer is a big resort. I hope they have better running
water.
Kari Jo and I
did everything you could imagine. We smoked grapevine and our first cigarettes,
which one of the boys from the cabins had stolen from his mother. They were “Lark”
cigarettes, weird that I would remember that. We met our first boyfriends that
summer. Mine was Billy Mosley. His parents had a cabin there that they went to
every summer. And Kari Jo’s boyfriend was his best friend, Greg Horn. Greg also
had parents that had a seasonal cabin up there. We made out and got our first
feel of a boy and even experimented, but very little. We were actually good
girls. We made a girl friend up there named Diane Alderson. She was much more
advanced than we were and she was a real learning experience. She gave us some
true romance magazines, and she wore a black bikini. She was a year or two
older than us and much more knowledgeable about sex, and life than we were. She
introduced us to music and boys and all kinds of things.
We swam and
fished all day. We went berry picking and found all kinds of weird fruit trees,
Peaches, plumbs, little wild cherries, wild onions, Black berries, Blueberries,
raspberries, Boysenberries, and all kinds of things like that.
We would go with grandpa in the boat and run
the trot line. We pulled some strange creatures off of that trot line. A trot
line is a long fishing line with a bunch of hooks on it that floated in the
water. We would go every morning and every night and check it. We have caught
big snapping turtles, snakes, big catfish, big Garr and croppy, big mouth bass,
everything you could think of. We even did weird things like play with the air
bladders that came out of one type of fish that would float like little balloons.
We would put stuff on them and float them around. One time “and I swear this is
the truth” My grandpa cut a big fish open and a mouse ran out of it.
When my
grandpa was young, he did some kind of weird fishing. It has a name but I can’t
think of it, I want to say “noodeling” but I am not sure that is what it was
called, anyway, they would swim down in the rivers and let a fifty pound
catfish bite on their hand and bring them up that way. I swear it is true.
There where giant catfish heads (skulls) hanging from a lot of trees there. It
was like a trophy thing. They were as big as human heads. Back in my grandpa’s
day, there are stories of catfish that weighed over a hundred pounds. I have
seen one as big as sixty pounds. Now most of those big fish have been fished
out.
