Hey, all. I know I’ve been gone for a long while. Like the rest of y’all, I’ve been mostly sheltering in place to avoid Covid-19. Like many of you, I thought that working from home would give me more time to write, but as someone wise said, it’s not about working from home, it’s about living at work. The job takes up as much mental energy as it ever did, and it hangs over my head in my off-hours in a way that it generally didn’t before.
That said, I am still writing, if not as much as I hoped or thought I would, and you’ll see some of it here soon. In the meantime, enjoy this tale of my first escape from the City – and my apartment – since March.
On Thursday, July 2, I piled into a rental car with my wife and my sister and made a run for the horizon.
Okay, so a rented SUV with a satellite radio that didn’t work was hardly Easy Rider, but after three months trapped in an apartment, it sure felt like it.
The BQE had more traffic than I expected. My mind had been filled with images from April, when an empty highway had traversed a silent city. My sister pointed out that that wasn’t what was happening anymore. If anything, with people going back to work and trying to avoid the subways, there were probably more cars on the road. It was hard to argue her point. Once we hit the Thruway, it was more like what I had hoped for: wide open spaces and green.
We stopped at a rest stop for lunch, and I was proud to see that everyone was being smart. Not everyone we would meet on our trip would be, but for now, even New Yorkers outside of Ground Zero know better.
We got off at the Westmoreland exit, and then I was driving roads I would know with my eyes closed. We passed through Rome, Taberg (don’t blink, you’ll miss it), and Camden (yes, Camden New York. It’s the town where I grew up, and it’s about the size of one neighborhood of the Camden you’re thinking of), and within the hour we had reached our destination: Panther Lake.
Panther Lake is pretty tiny, about three miles long, a quarter mile wide, and thirty feet deep at its deepest point. Well, twenty-eight feet this year, it’s been a very dry summer.
The lake has changed a lot in the nearly thirty years I’ve been going there. In the beginning, it was a redneck party place, with cabins and fishing boats and a raucous bar at the East end. Now it’s more of a retirement community, with year-round homes and party barges. The bar burned down years ago. My parents may or may not have been trendsetters, but they were definitely early adopters, being among the first to build a year-round home on the lake:
On the other hand, some things don’t change that fast. The woods still show the scars of the big storm of ’95, and if the raucous groups of young party people who rented the few remaining cabins for the holiday are any indication, the cycle may be about to turn again. But that’s for another summer.
Got my hair cut on the second day there. What a relief. The barber shop was in a mini-mall just off Interstate 81, and you had to call in when you arrived, then wait in your car until they called you back and you could go in. People still being smart…to a point. The barber was still wearing his mask below his nose, after all.
The Fourth was a little sad. The traditional Keville Clan 4th of July Party, which often brings in fifty or more aunts, uncles, and cousins, obviously couldn’t happen this year. It was much less of a burden on my mother, but she still missed it. Even half of my siblings couldn’t come. My youngest sister is a doctor on the Covid front lines, and my brother, newly retired from the Air Force, had just traveled cross country and was living in a mobile home while looking for a house in North Carolina. And my parents are in their seventies.
Covid is cruel.
So it was just me, my wife, my other sister, my parents, and my grandmother for the 4th this year, and I suspect the rest of the lake was experiencing similar. Certainly the rich family’s compound at the other end of the lake had only a couple dozen guests, instead of the hundred or more it usually would.
But that didn’t mean we weren’t going to celebrate Independence Day, by God.
If you live in the City, it’s easy to forget small town pleasures. And Panther Lake’s celebration of the 4th of July is perhaps one of the most Country things you’ve ever seen. All of the party barges are decked out in flags and patriotic buntings and gather at the east end of the lake, where the bar and boat launch used to be. The president of the Panther Lake Association gives a speech honoring local veterans for their service (poor man’s sound system is absolute garbage, couldn’t hear a word he said) and then we all stand for the national anthem. The girl who usually sings it got married that weekend – the nerve! – so instead we played a recording by Carrie Underwood. Then the party barges parade around the lake, waving to everyone on the shore. We were close to the front, and the line wrapped halfway around the lake behind us. The lead boat played a medley of patriotic songs, and he had a proper playlist this year so we only heard “God Bless the USA” by Lee Greenwood twice.
I repeat, one of the most Country things you’ve ever seen, and a complete blast.
The rich family at the other end of the lake usually has a professional fireworks show, but they understandably cancelled it this year. The rest of the lake made up for it though, and if there was a nervous moment or two when that tree caught fire, it was still a great show.
The next day, my wife and I headed out to visit her family in the Southern Tier. We stopped at another rest stop on the Thruway, and that was where we met the first and really only person we saw who was being stupid about the Covid. Maybe not everyone was wearing their mask, but this fool was the only one yelling about everyone being sheep.
Anyway, we picked up her father and traveled on to a house that her sister had rented on Keuka Lake:
Keuka Lake is one of the Finger Lakes, a series of long, narrow glacial lakes that look like God put his hand down in the middle of New York State. They constitute New York’s wine country – my younger sister got married at a beautiful vineyard there, and nearly got murdered by my other sister for drinking a wine slushie in her wedding dress before the ceremony. You should totally visit there when tourism is safe again.
Keuka is much bigger than Panther Lake at twenty miles long, nearly 200 feet deep, and as much as two miles wide. What you see there on the other side isn’t actually the other side of the lake, though. It’s the bluff that splits the lake into a distinctive “Y” shape.
The house my sister-in-law rented (“Helvetia House”, Finger Lakes Premier Properties) was a former hotel and yacht club, and it was absolutely beautiful, though the bar in the basement (prices from the 1920’s still on the chalkboard, 20 cents for a steak) is absolutely haunted:
And by purest chance, Helvetia House was about a quarter-mile walk from the cottage that belongs to the other side of my family, so I got a chance to visit my other grandmother!
(With them at 94 and 96 years old, you don’t pass up an opportunity for a visit. And no, they’ve never seen anything like this year before either.)
The stay at Helvetia House was much less eventful than the stay at Panther, which was just fine. It was hot enough that even Keuka, which is usually chilly, was good for swimming. So a few hot, lazy days in the lake later, my wife and I were on our way back to the City.
And you know what? In spite of pandemics and protests and everything else, we were glad to be back. We’ve lived in places before where we’ve returned from vacations and quoted the last reel of The Warriors – “This is what we fought all night to get back to?” – but we’ve never said that about our current neighborhood.
When we went back to work the next day, on the other hand…
(Kidding, Kidding.)