Live Oak Blues What happens.

Yesterday I put my boat into six inches of black muck at Orange Lake and had to turn around after only a few feet of serious digging. That lake is draining faster than the left side of my kitchen sink. Either because I haven’t had a decent outing in weeks, or because I am reading Henry Rollins’s Get In The Van: On The Road With Black Flag, I’ve been in a reminiscent state of mind of late.

I grew up in Suburbia, a subdivision called in Indian Lakes in Virginia Beach, Virginia. In my neighborhood, there were only three styles of house: three-bedroom, four-bedroom, and five-bedroom. Thus, we all knew the layout of every house we entered. About a half mile down the road was the lake of Indian Lakes, a steam-shovel-created borrow pit that no living thing who wanted to live would inhabit. This is where I paddled for the first time.  We stole the 17′ Grumman canoe from our garage when my dad was at work and put in, had a blast, and lugged it all the way back. Same old, same old.

The already suffering ecology of the lake took a serious beating several years later when my buddy Andy stole a huge chunk of potassium from the chemistry lab and threw it in the lake closest to Indian Lakes Blvd. The explosion was so loud that cars stopped. Years earlier, for whatever reason I can’t recall, the neighborhood bully, Ross, and his crew forced me off the bus one frigid day and forced me to walk across the lake. As the ice gave way under me I headed back to shore only to have Ross and gang throw rocks at me to keep me going. There are days, at work particularly, I feel just like that. This took place mere feet from where a neighborhood child of four drowned one fall morning the following year. I still think about him.