Camp where you like, but leave my stones alone. Climb with gentle footsteps and hang on lest you fall.
If Nickerson Lake was my lake, as I called it, then the granite pit was mine as well. I crossed the lake from our cottage in the rowboat, which became the motorboat only when Porter put the quarter-horse motor on the back and used it himself. I had no desire to use the motor; every so often someone would lose one off the boat and those motors are probably all still on the bottom of the lake.
Making sure that the boat was secure and could not drift, I sort of half-crawled, half-walked among the huge granite chunks, and saw no real signs of a pit. Perhaps it was long since filled in and had to be imagined. A rather timid explorer in that other world, I went there only a few times and never ventured very far from the boat.
With Nickerson Lake as mine, I appropriated everything within sight: my island up at the end, my spring directly across from the cottage, as well as another one over to the right a ways. This second one was well covered with a movable concrete block, and long since abandoned.
When we were very little, Leonard and I would play in the cove, simply an indentation down beside the front of the cottage, ending up on dry land. It was easily viewed from the front glassed-in porch. We would not venture out around to the wharves.
The two wharves had a space between them wider than either wharf. Porter built a third wharf and made it pivot halfway back to let the boat roll back and forth on rollers. Then the “boat-house” sections would be lowered to form a roof over the boat.
Looking at an old photo album recently, I came across one of Ina’s notes. Pier she had written instead of wharf. How could she? Maybe she brought it back from one of her trips away to visit. I would never use it, except for a pier in New Jersey, where people I knew from Philadelphia used to stand all night with fishing rods propped up, apparently not caring if they caught anything or not.
A couple of months ago now, I had to grant to Betti, another former lake resident, now e-mailing me, the right to call it her lake, as well. Her parents and grandparents had cottages side by side on a large cove just a short walk on the way down to the Crescent Park pavilion. A very big dance hall up on stilts, it had all-day suckers like nothing I have ever seen elsewhere. Each was an irregular chunk of something more like a hard tootsie-roll than a regular sucker or lollipop. You could save one to enjoy for days.
These are memories to be cherished and shared.
Byrna Porter Weir was born and grew up in Houlton, where her parents were portrait photographers. She now lives in Rochester, N.Y.
