Young love in an old cabin

 

Part 1:

We were young at the time and only occasionally acting like adults. It was the end of our summer and I suppose we were marking it with a weekend away.

We two had worked the summer on the mall on campus in the city. She lived off Hennepin in Uptown and I lived off Hennepin on the other side of downtown. The campus was between us along the river, on Washington Avenue, from which bridge John Berryman committed suicide. It had been our summer and we bookended it with a weekend together like adults.

Her parents had a cabin, a Minnesota-style lake cabin, and on Friday afternoon we packed up and loaded my Ford Escort (paid for by my check number 1142 for $2,500). We stopped at a famous German place in a touristy small town, and I drank beer like an adult, not as a college student, though it took me a few tall samples to understand the nomenclature of European beer. And I ordered jagerschnitzel, because I liked the name which meant “hunter schnitzel.”

We got to the lake in the dark and the drive in was this side of a long row of tightly-packed, small, old cabins, on the far side of which was the lake glimmering in the moonlight. Theirs was small and dark and quaint and stuffy, with a sitting room and TV and kitchen and bathroom and one bedroom, and half the porch was converted into a room for another bed.

We went around and turned on the water main and gas and main circuit, and although I had turned on the mains at my grandfather’s and the gas and water at my uncle’s before, it was around this time that I decided I didn’t want to be turning anything on and then off at anybody else’s place other than my own or my father’s in my upcoming adult life.

On Saturday she taught me a game, cribbage I think it was. I can’t remember. I never played it before or since. I’ve never been a player of cabin games; not much of card games, either. I can’t remember who won or lost. It seems to me that I had beginners’ luck and beat her and that she got pouty. Although I think it was the opposite and she beat me and I resented it because I couldn’t stand losing, especially to her. So, we didn’t play much cribbage that weekend.

As I said, that was a Saturday, and late summer, and this was a weekend vacation, so I wanted to lay on the floor to watch college football the way my father used to watch Monday Night Football. She and I were Gophers, but it was the Jim Wacker era of Gopher football, and he was a snake-oil salesman, so I wasn’t a fan. It was the start of the Barry Alvarez – Darrell Bevell era in Badger football (Bevell the QB, who was my age at the time, but who was a man, and who beat UCLA in the Rose Bowl), so I probably wanted to watch that. She resented that though and got pouty. She didn’t like sports (except softball, which she excelled at once). She was a mod, a rocker. A “mocker,” as the Beatles used to say. A punk.

Finally, we got on our swimsuits and went out to the dock. I remember that I had packed along my old 7’6” Herter’s fly rod and the South Bend reel because I always liked fly-casting off of docks over lake water, and wherever I went in those days if I could I would bring the fly rod. But it was too windy that weekend.

We went in off the end of the dock and it was freezing, and I sat there in the wavy water just freezing and she was swimming out and around and whatnot. I can’t remember if she went under the water or not. You know how sometimes women don’t get their hair wet. She had thick blonde hair. I climbed up on the dock because I thought I was going to freeze in the water. But I was freezing there on the end of the dock with the wind coming off the lake and the mostly-cloudiness, and I was thinking that this was walleye weather and how the diving ducks would fly in this wind, and what the hell am I doing here, sitting here on my bony bottom on a hard dock with my knees drawn up to my chin and me hugging my legs. What the hell.

She was just swimming around like a sea otter and wanting me to come back in and play with her, literally play with her, and frustrated that I refused. I remember how I figured that woman were always warmer blooded than me. I think that because they always seem to have more body fat than me; they were bigger boned. In those days I was often very sick, and I smoked some, and I ate like a college kid. I was skinny. Of course, my high school buddies, who were always so pink and plump and healthy, were always able to stand the cold – in the water swimming, or in the winter skiing or ice fishing – longer than me.

We – me and her – we did “utilize” the cabin twice while we were there. Once at night in the porch bedroom, and the other time in the shower, maybe after she swam, and I had warmed up. It was out where we hadn’t been before, where I hadn’t been before, and we together hadn’t been before. And where I, for one, haven’t been since.