The Point

Jutting into the south-east corner of lake Tiorati is an elbow of land known as “The Point”. The rocky bottom edge of the summer camp of my childhood. Let me take you there.

A point is just a point. To know it you need to look at the space around it. It can be sharp so I’ll suggest that you approach gently.

Above The Point you have “The Blacktop”. Three basketball courts and a handball court. The Blacktop is bounded by fences fifteen feet high and you’re a boy as old as the fence is tall, so you like to throw from half-court. With the dangerous combination of strength and reckless abandon you occasionally toss the ball over the backboard, over the fence.

With luck, there’s a kid within shouting distance who doesn’t fear poison ivy, thorns or snakes. Induce him through bribe or intimidation to scurry down the steep hill for you. If he’s fast enough he can outrun the ball before it navigates the bouncy, rolly, bushy maze to the lake. If you’re not so lucky, or he’s not so fast, you wade into the rocky muck yourself. You see, the balls are on loan from the Supply Shack and the Supply Shack specialist knows where you sleep.

Lets skirt the brambles and approach from the north instead. Here, down hill from the hand ball court, there is a natural wall of stone perhaps seven feet high. Pure vertical and sparing with the handholds. When you were eight years old it took the better part of a week to discover a climbing plan. You’ve come to this place every summer for twelve years. Every summer, all summer. We’ll go down this way.

Down, around the point and east again, until the trees and mosquitoes thicken. The name will change with the terrain from “the point” to “the pit”. Here, hidden like a family secret there are three wooden bunks. Open cabin frames with no power or plumbing. “Savages” live here. Or so they are called. Legend holds that they survive on beetles, lichen and crab-apple wine hardened in stills crafted from oak bark and sod. They climb up mountains with hand carved canoes and build rope bridges across lakes. All this pales when you see what they can do with a 165 gram Frisbee.

Look out at the water, the far shore here is about 300 yards. The Point is to your right. East, along to your left is a frog pond. With a stick, some Nylon line, a fish-hook from the Supply Shack and a bag of three day old Wonder Bread from Junior Dining Hall the cat-fish can be seduced from their water. Don’t want to touch the fish, all scaly and flopping? Try this technique; rest it on the grass, put your shoe softly on its belly, twist the hook from its mouth and kick it back into the water. Look, it swims away. It’s still alive. Perhaps you hate fishing as much as I did.

The Point is where you run, followed by Sean D., Clement C. and a third whose face cannot be seen through your tears. You broke free from a “play” fight gone bad and fled a quarter mile down the partially paved road. In your madness you ran into the woods. The three of them corner you at the water’s edge and continue their beating. You curl up into a ball and don’t return a single punch. You are fortunate, there are no weapons. Thirteen year olds are strong but perhaps not bone-breakingly so. You are scraped and bruised but not broken. The blood is enough to get at least one of them sent home.

The Point is not where you learn to fight but where you learn that you need to.

Somewhat off the point, a few hundred yards to the north there is a rock. Beside it, you have your first kiss. The new kind of kiss. She is “on loan” from sometimes friend Seamonkey. The name of her menthol cigarettes is Newport. The name of the girl curls away into the air.

Also off the point, as far north but westward there is another rock, flat and long, sloshing out into the lake. Here you drink your first full quart of Colt 45. You still email with Lisa who holds your head that night.

Back to The Point then. It is the locale of your first game of strip poker. You’re sixteen and you’ve lost everything but your sleeping bag. That same night, back in your jeans, you hear Jules the van driver (chauffeur if you prefer) play “Summer Breeze” on a borrowed guitar. After thirty years you wonder if you’ll ever feel another piece of music pull at you that way.

That’s The Point.