Once More to the Lake

“I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father.” 

White’s feeling that he is literally inhabiting his childhood is one of the essay’s most striking propositions. His experience, as described here, borders on magical and stands out in contrast to the rest of the essay. By describing this strange feeling in such a striking manner, White underscores its thematic importance, which is to provide an example of time passing even as the underlying dynamic—in this case the relationship between father and son—remains the same.

“We went fishing the first morning. I felt the same damp moss covering the worms in the bait can, and saw the dragonfly alight on the tip of my rod as it hovered a few inches from the surface of the water. It was the arrival of this fly that convinced me beyond any doubt that everything was as it always had been, that the years were a mirage and there had been no years.”

Here, White describes the precise moment he feels most strongly that he is reliving his past. This moment fully expresses the fullness of his conviction that there is an undeniable, underlying sameness that he is able to experience by returning to the lake. Even though he notes several material changes that have taken place since his earlier visits, he identifies a sort of spiritual continuity that is able to completely negate time’s passage.

“This seemed an utterly enchanted sea, this lake you could leave to its own devices for a few hours and come back to, and find that it had not stirred, this constant and trustworthy body of water.”

White emphasizes the lake’s near-mystical quality in this passage. By contrasting the lake of his childhood with the sea he associates with his adult life, he suggests that the lake can recall the past. Unlike the ocean, which is affected by the rolling waves and tidal cycles, the lake maintains a placid, constant surface that allows White to associate it with other persistent cycles of life.

“Some of the other campers were in swimming, along the shore, one of them with a cake of soap, and the water felt thin and clear and insubstantial. Over the years there had been this person with the cake of soap, this cultist, and here he was. There had been no years.” 

Here, White is again overtaken by the feeling that there have been “no years” since his childhood visits. Furthermore, this quote links that feeling to the religious language White uses to characterize the lake. His description of a fellow vacationer as a “cultist” suggests an active element to the lake’s apparent power to suspend time. White and this fellow camp-goer are engaged in ritualistic behaviors that preserve the patterns of life at the lake. 

“Up to the farmhouse to dinner through the teeming, dusty field, the road under our sneakers was only a two-track road. The middle track was missing, the one with the marks of the hooves and the splotches of dried, flaky manure. There had always been three tracks to choose from in choosing which track to walk in; now the choice was narrowed down to two. For a moment I missed terribly the middle alternative.” 

Immediately after asserting that there had been no years, White notes a minor difference that, temporarily, bothers him. The middle track to the farmhouse, which was reserved for horse travel, has been eliminated to make room for a larger two-track path. Although minor, the change reminds White of a nationwide transition away from travel by horse, which serves as undeniable proof that he is growing older and that time continues to pass.

“[T]he waitresses were the same country girls, there having been no passage of time, only the illusion of it as in a dropped curtain—the waitresses were still fifteen; their hair had been washed, that was the only difference—they had been to the movies and seen the pretty girls with the clean hair.” 

While White notes that the waitresses are “the same country girls” he remembers from his childhood, he ends this quote with a recognition that they are different from the girls he remembers. This difference is the result of the country girls’ exposure to movies, which has influenced their personal habits. Modernity, represented by the movies, creeps into White’s description of his dinner and spoils his impression of the lake as a space existing outside of time.

“Summertime, oh summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweet fern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end; this was the background, and the life along the shore was the design, the cottages with their innocent and tranquil design, their tiny docks with the flagpole and the American flag floating against the white clouds in the blue sky, the little paths over the roots of the trees leading from camp to camp and the paths leading back to the outhouses and the can of lime for sprinkling, and at the souvenir counters at the store the miniature birch-bark canoes and the post cards that showed things looking a little better than they looked.” 

This quote offers insight into White’s belief in certain eternal qualities inherent to human life and the world at large. He describes the qualities of the lake and its surroundings, in which he identifies a natural, undisturbed beauty. The second part of the sentence speaks to the human development that has been built up around these natural elements. As such, this sentence contextualizes White’s reverent attitude regarding his childhood summers, and his feeling of reliving those experiences in the present.

“It seemed to me, as I kept remembering all this, that those times and those summers had been infinitely precious and worth saving. There had been jollity and peace and goodness.” 

Here, White explicitly states the qualities that he finds so valuable in his childhood memories of the lake. Primarily, he appeals to a kind of innocence and goodness often associated with children and childhood. Furthermore, he identifies these things as “infinitely precious and worth saving”, again tying his own memories to an ongoing system and stating his intent to intervene on behalf of preserving that system. 

“The only thing that was wrong now, really, was the sound of the place, an unfamiliar nervous sound of the outboard motors. This was the note that jarred, the one thing that would sometimes break the illusion and set the years moving.” 

This acute expression of displeasure regards the ways in which the lake has changed. While other instances of modernity are present at the camp (the tarred road, the waitresses’ hair), they are somewhat obscured, unlike the noise from the outboard motorboats. As such, the outboard engines are a threat to White; they ruin White’s illusion that he has returned to his childhood.

“Watching him I would remember the things you could do with the old one-cylinder engine with the heavy flywheel, how you could have it eating out of your hand if you got really close to it spiritually.” 

Following his irritation with outboard motors, White falls into a reverie as he recalls the motorboats he used to operate as a child. This quote illustrates that White is not wholly opposed to modernity and the progression of time. By connecting his son’s experience to his own memories of operating one-cylinder engines, he exposes how modern technology can fit within life’s larger, cyclical patterns.

“Everywhere we went I had trouble making out which was I, the one walking at my side, the one walking in my pants.”

Throughout the essay and up to this point, White notes the feeling that he is reenacting his childhood. Here, that impression takes on an especially dissociative note, as White describes feeling outside his body as he walks alongside his son. Although White finds solace in identifying these sorts of cyclical relationships, this quote should be read in the context of being “creepy”, as he describes the sensation earlier in the essay. The feeling that he is literally reliving his childhood appears to be simultaneously attractive and frightening to White.

“It was like the revival of an old melodrama that I had seen long ago with childish awe. The second-act climax of the drama of the electrical disturbance over a lake in America had not changed in any important respect. This was the big scene, still the big scene. The whole thing was so familiar, the first feeling of oppression and heat and a general air around camp of not wanting to go very far away.” 

Describing a thunderstorm that appeared over the lake during his visit with his son, White reiterates his awareness of the cyclical quality of nature. Notably, White describes the storm in terms of a melodrama, complete with a three-act structure with a climax in the second act. In this way, he describes an act of nature on a human scale, thereby restating his belief in a human desire to understand their existence in the cyclical patterns of the world and nature.

“Afterward the calm, the rain steadily rustling in the calm lake, the return of light and hope and spirits, and the campers running out in joy and relief to go swimming in the rain, their bright cries perpetuating the deathless joke about how they were getting simply drenched, and the children screaming with delight at the new sensation of bathing in the rain, and the joke about getting drenched linking the generations in a strong indestructible chain.” 

Following the storm’s dissipation, life on the lake returns to normal. White identifies this return to calm as further evidence of life’s cyclical movements. Noting the “deathless jokes” the campers shout at one another, White strongly implies his belief in behaviors, feelings, and impulses that link humanity across generations and time.