Some distance off the southern shoreline of Pine Lake, about five feet beneath the surface, there’s a rock. It’s a good-sized rock, you might even call it a boulder, but in the grand scheme of things it’s an inconsequential rock, likely one of many glacial erratics deposited here when the Cordilleran Ice Sheet extended down from British Columbia into Washington state during the Pleistocene epoch. When the ice retreated roughly 12,000 years ago, the Puget Sound region was left with a number of lakes, including Pine Lake and its neighbor, Beaver Lake, both now located in the city of Sammamish.
I say “now” because the area used to be rural, unincorporated King County, and back then the name “Sammamish” referred most specifically to the much larger lake down the hill and to the west of Pine Lake. The eponymous Sammamish High School, which is not one of the four high schools located within the city limits of Sammamish, is located many miles to the west in the city of Bellevue.
Well, the names may change, but the stone remains the same. From my family’s dock on Pine Lake, it would take half a minute to swim out to the rock and an area that my three brothers and I referred to as “The Island,” which was not an island so much as a shallow spot beneath the surface. It was amusing to swim out there and stand on the island, water at your armpits, and watch the boaters do double takes. It was even more fun to locate the rock, which by the end of a hot summer could elevate you until the water was at your waist.
One of my favorite times to search for the rock was at night, when the mysteries beneath the lake’s surface became even more pronounced. Who knew what lurked down there when the stars clicked on and the water turned as dark as ink? The lake bottom, coated by a soft, sedimentary muck, never quite prepared you for encountering the rock’s hardness. You’d swim out to the island and walk around, feeling tentatively with your toes. Sometimes you’d find it, sometimes not. Sometimes a fish would brush against your calf. I’m sure there were times when I came within inches of my goal before giving up and heading back to shore.
When I was younger, my dad swam out to the island with us, but he generally preferred to stay on the dock. An avid golfer, he brought home floating golf balls one year, along with a patch of Astroturf. Early in the evening, when most people had gone in for supper, our family took turns whacking balls toward the opposite shore while one of us puttered around in the boat with a fishing net as a scoop. My dad would give us tips on how to swing a club and then stand back to puff on his cigar. When he died in November of 2013, I walked out onto the dock and surveyed the calm, mist-laden water as the sun rose over the trees. Ice crystals had formed on the dock, and they crunched audibly underfoot. Not knowing what else to do, not knowing yet how to process the moment, I took out my phone and memorialized the crystals on the boards and the shroud of mist cloaking the neighboring docks. I needed something to mark the day, a picture of a natural occurrence that would freeze time like those crystals before it melted away. Back in the house, my dad’s cooling body lay waiting for the rest of the family to arrive, and after that, the stoic attendants from Flintoft’s Funeral Home.
_________
During this hot summer of 2017, when smoke comes down from Canada instead of sheets of ice, I find myself comforted by the rock’s presence. Just the other day, while visiting my mom, I located the solitary boulder—not once, not twice, but three times because, well, it’s easy to lose your coordinates underwater. Swim far enough away, and it can take a while to regain your bearings. Every summer day that I visit my mom, now, I wonder if it might be my last chance to find this personal monument to endurance (meaning both the rock’s permanence and the amount of time it can take to find the thing). And I think of all the friends and classmates who used to live on the lake or nearby and whose families may have long since departed, their houses sold, torn down, and replaced by swankier homes with pristine lawns and strong, fortress-like bulkheads along the waterfront.
The shoreline didn’t used to be this way. It used to harbor snakes and frogs. I have not seen tadpoles near the dock in decades. Before I could swim, I used to dig my fingers into the gray clay along the shore, beneath the roots of a fir tree that had been clinging there for generations.
It’s hard not to be sentimental about your childhood home, about summer days spent playing rag tag between docks or winter afternoons playing touch football on the ice when the lake froze over (a rare occurence). The lake was a commons, a byway, a runway, a theater. One of my brothers used to stuff his clothes into a plastic bag and swim to the park at the east end, where he’d meet up with his girlfriend. Somebody at the far corner of the lake owned a floatplane, which would come propelling toward us until it gained lift and cleared a flotilla of mallards. On the Fourth of July, most everyone who had a dock set off fireworks late into the evening, and the next day you’d see the torn, soggy carcasses of Roman candles and Whistling Petes bobbing in the water.
Memories can become nostalgia in a heartbeat, and nostalgia can become a playground for stubborn minds stuck in a halcyon glow. “You can’t go home again,” Thomas Wolfe reminds us. Times change. Municipalities enact laws to help make such changes sustainable, and as a result you’ll no longer see people speeding along Pine Lake in floatplanes or boats with gas-powered outboard motors. I miss those days for nostalgic reasons, but I know the lake’s speed limit was adopted out of ecological necessity. The waves ate at the shoreline, which is why a lot of those bulkheads were first built. Fireworks are no longer permitted on the Fourth for what seems to be an obvious reason.
If I’m being honest, I’m saddened by the changes around the lake less because the big homes and big lawns are an affront to some sense of aesthetic proportion than because these dwellings—most of them—are simply not the ones I remember from my youth. There used to be shacks and cabins, some with wild, unkempt growth along the shoreline. A few of the older homes remain, including my mom’s (once “my parent’s,” once “mine”), but I have to remind myself that today’s lake will be tomorrow’s nostalgia for somebody else.
At nearly 87, my mom is still healthy enough to spend much of her day tending her garden. But I don’t like to think about the day when I can no longer return to Pine Lake as a resident or as the son of a resident. Certainly, I could go to the park, put in a kayak, and paddle around, but it wouldn’t be the same. Somebody else will live in that house, or, more likely, somebody else will tear it down and build a new one.
I’m pretty certain, however, that unless a new ice age arrives the rock will still be in its place, unseen by those on the surface but available to anyone who wants to search long enough to find it.