Fish and Gun

My car has returned. It was seriously disabled and there was talk of putting it down. But, several hundreds of dollars later and it is back in the land of the living. We took my parents' car back to them (they kindly let us borrow it for  a week) and while we were there, took Chaucer for a walk through the Templeton Fish and Gun, which is through the woods or down the street from my parents' house. This place is a direct link to my childhood.

I lived in Templeton, therefore, I played in the woods. There really wasn't much else to do, and the woods at my house were ripe for playing in. My dad and neighbor, together bought over fifty acres of woods across the street. A skidder had previously gone through and begun to deforest the woods there. It didn't actually make it very far in the process though. All it really did was to cut winding roads through the deep woods. These roads were ready access to the deep pine woods that sprawled endlessly across the street and were starting points for my exploration of them. I built so many tree forts, and camps across the street that I couldn't actually count them all. There was rivers and steep hills, odd clearings and inexplicably loose doberman pinchers. Bit by bit I mentally mapped out that land until I knew it so well that getting lost in it was almost impossible.


At the far end of the eastern corner was the very tip of the Templeton Fish and Gun. It's essentially a lake, Partridgeville Lake, that is surrounded by summer camps, a few winterized, and dirt roads. During the summer, my neighbor and best friend Jay and I  would fish or carry the various ubiquitous floaty, pool things down to the lake and swim. We even laid, mental if not physical, claim to one particular, unpopulated peninsula and called it our own. In the fall and winter, when everyone would vacate the camp, the entire place became ours. We brought our dogs, bikes, snowmobiles down and would endlessly trace the dirt roads that surround the lake.

I haven't been back there in a long time. Actually, the last time I was there was eight years ago when Jenny, after a "spontaneous" walk around the lake to a secluded picnic table next to the beach, proceeded to spin the entire world out of control by telling me that she was pregnant with our first kiddo. The Templeton Fish and Gun hasn't changed in many ways since I was ten. There are a few more camps, but the majority of them are the same ones that I blasted by with my snowmobile. Jenny and I walked with my Dad as well as Henry and Nora around the entire lake today. It was a bit of a mind trip to see Henry and Nora walking down those paths... my paths. Chaucer ran the same roads as my old dogs, Sadie and Josie. Although, Chauc is a little more appreciative of the water then they were. It was a nice day in the midst of the craziness of putting on the play.