George Winston - Minstrels
page 4
When I die, I want my ashes thrown into Green Lake, just off the shore outside the Dance Building. Interlochen means “between lakes”, and the campus does occupy the narrow slice of land between Green Lake and Duck Lake. The Duck Lake side is really only used in the summertime for the National Music Camp, the empty cabins standing quiet and lonely during the winter months. It was a popular place to wander off to if you wanted to sneak a smoke – of whatever – or break into one of the drafty cabins. But the Green Lake side is where the Academy is located, and it is the lake that was home to me, was my power spot, where an inordinate number of significant events happened.
Green Lake was the lake in which I learned how to swim. I would always take the early class, meeting on the dock in front of the hotel at 10 in the morning with my friends. We liked the bracing coldness of the morning lake, and the way it was calm and glassy, before the tourists and campers had kicked the sand up off the bottom. We were the true inhabitants, the few that lived there all year long, and on those crisp summer mornings, we’d lay claim to the lake. Our lake. My lake.
I swam across that lake one summer, a mere half mile or so, but an eternal journey to me, humbling and frightening. I was a strong swimmer, comfortable in the water, but when I staggered up onto the shore, shaky and sick with exhaustion, I vowed never to take that placid water for granted again.
We lived briefly on the peninsula that cut into the lake, directly opposite from the Academy. During the winter, the lake would freeze deep enough that you could drive a car across it, and I’d sometimes walk across the lake on Saturday afternoons to meet my mom after her day of teaching. Because Interlochen ran on a Tuesday through Saturday schedule, I had Saturdays to myself, and learned to inhabit the solitude until it became comforting.
During the winter months, we were cautioned against walking across the lake, not for fear of thin ice, but for fear of white-outs. Once, halfway across the frozen expanse by myself, a blizzard blew up and turned the world into a white cotton cocoon. I had heard stories about people panicking in the disorienting blindness of white, stumbling around in circles until they froze to death. But I didn’t find it scary at all. The world obliterated, I wandered through a nameless, shapeless void, strangely happy, calm and peaceful in the oblivion. Twenty minutes later, I was disappointed to see the wind let up and the faint grey silhouettes of trees on the shore come tentatively into focus.
I got my first girlfriend on the shores of that lake. And I started losing her on the same shores, when I kissed another at the end of my senior year. The first time I got high, I was sitting up in a tree that stretched out over its shallow water with my three best friends, the lights of the Academy twinkling in the distance. I camped on its shores. I waded through its shallows. I canoed around its edges and water-skied across its jittery waves. I discovered the definitive physical differences between boys and girls as my friends and I splashed in the waves and sprouted into puberty, our bathing suits suddenly transformed from trivial bits of clothing to exotic vessels containing the most enticing and alluring of mysteries. Like the selfless tree in Shel Silverstein’s beautifully heartbreaking book, it was the giving lake, and I drank deep of all it had to offer. But it was also the taking lake.