Bickards – Feulners Diamond Lake

By Thomas Feulner

My great-grandfather built our cabin on the south shore of Diamond lake before my mother was born about 1923.   We’ve kept the cabin very rustic—wood stove and all (though we did upgrade from an outhouse to a real bathroom sometime in the late 1960s).  My mother’s family was made up of a string of only children, so my generation was the first that showed up in force.  There are four of us kids: Theresa, Nicholas, Thomas, and Timothy.

When I was very young my brother Timothy and I would get out the old pots and dishes from the boathouse and make seven-course meals for my grandmother.  There was soup made of lakewater and leaves, steaks of sand, cakes of muck, and anything else she ordered.

At night we watched the stars, searched for frogs, and you may have heard us playing Aggravation or some other obnoxiously loud board game into the wee hours.  We had time to read, had muck fights in the lake, rowed my grandfather’s red row boat out to the lily pads, and took walks down Elu Beach Road, catching grasshoppers all the way.  At the end of a long day of swimming, my father would bundle us up in our beach towels one by one and carry us from the dock up to the cabin so we wouldn’t track sand all over the place.  He called us sacks of potatoes.

I brought my girlfriend from Stanford out to the lake a couple summers ago.  She was raised in Queens, so she’d never spent much time on lakes.  She caught her first fish.  It was a sunfish that we had to throw back.  Then she caught that same fish again.  It’s easy for those of us that grew up on the Lake to forget how unique it is and how lucky we are to be there.  Watching her experience that for the first time made me feel like I was a kid rowing through the lily pads with my brothers again.

I graduated last spring and decided to take the summer off before moving down to San Francisco and getting a job.  At the lake, time moves slower.  When there is work to be done, we do it with purpose, and when it’s done, we open up beers and light a fire.  Life is perfect and simple there.  I hold on to those days I spent out at the lake against the crazed rush of San Francisco, and the financial district, and the taxis, and trains, and deadlines, and happy hours.  At the lake things just make sense, and it’s comforting to have that, even when I’m all the way down here.

            This summer the whole family will fly back from New York or California or wherever they are to continue the tradition of a family weekend at the lake.  If you sit out on your porch late at night on the first weekend in August, you might just hear us over the Boy Scouts.