The Rivers and the Lakes That I'm Used To

Making a case for returning to the same spot every single summer

Hey hey it’s Ponytail Up’s (the Substack version) second birthday! Thank you for reading, whether you’re new here or have been around since the beginning!

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Labor Day weekend has a way of making me feel a little restless even though I love fall perhaps equally as I do summer. But soon the drone of cicadas in our backyard will fade. Soon I’ll start craving a fresh purchase from the LL Bean catalog, preferably flannel-lined. Gotta have some early autumnal melancholy to counterbalance all that brat summer. I have a Spotify playlist specifically to capture the existential malaise of this time of year; there’s a lot of Lana del Rey on it. 

This feeling always bubbles up after two of my favorite annual summer trips are done, to two spots in Wisconsin that I’ve been returning to for over a decade.

The Lakes

traveling the Chain from one lake to the next

Our first family visit  to the Chain O’ Lakes in central Wisconsin was when I was just a kid, maybe five or six years old, lugging a purple stuffed My Little Pony with me on the pier and onto the pontoon boat where I’d drink orange Tang with my cousins. Those are core childhood memories for me: chasing fireflies at sunset, snapping the ends of green beans into a metal bowl, screaming and running away when my cousins baited their fishing hooks with worms. About twelve years ago, my parents began a new annual tradition of renting a big house on the lake for a week in July, inviting all us kids to join them. For a chaotically large family, it’s a dedicated time to look forward to all being together

After over a decade of returning to the lakes, we have accumulated many traditions that we must do every year: swim at Sandy Beach, play mini golf on a sunny afternoon, go bowling on a rainy afternoon, go for a midday ice cream run, eat dinner at the wood-paneled local restaurant that looks like a captain’s quarters, shop on Main Street for local knick knacks that Kurt likes to call “Live Lake Love.” Anytime we get together, my family plays a highly competitive game of Celebrity that is the bane of every in-law’s existence (good luck marrying into this family if you can’t pull out Liza Minelli based on a one-word clue). By the end of the week, my blood feels thick with New Glarus Moon Man, deep-fried cheese curds, and sunshine. Being at the lakes is living in a John Cougar Mellencamp song. I dream of the lakes all winter long, mentally escaping polar vortexes by remembering past summers spent sitting on the pontoon boat in the warm sun, reading a book with my feet kicked up, the wafting scent of sunscreen and towels damp with that unmistakable lakey smell, a little bit Swamp Thing and a whole lot of childhood nostalgia.

The lakes are a constant; as I get older and the years rack up between those childhood summers and the present, the water is the same spring-fed aquamarine blue. The sun will rise and set behind that same tree line, casting the old growth pines into silhouette. And now I watch my niece and nephew take their first dips into the water, getting a little taller every summer, my niece modeling the exact same purple nightgown I wore forty years ago, passed down to my sisters and cousins until it resurfaced on this particular July night, the same moonlight glinting on the lake outside the window.

The River 

canoeing on the Wisconsin River

For the last twenty-one years, ever since our mid-twenties, a group of our friends has returned to the same spot along the sandy-bottomed Wisconsin River for an annual camping/canoeing trip. We’d arrive on Friday evening, pitch our tents on the riverbank, then on Saturday set out with a cooler in each canoe, hang out on sandbars, and pretend we’re not peeing when we wander away from the group in waist-deep water, but just, you know, enjoying the outdoor scenery. The trip is called Caboozing, an invention of our earlier selves when we felt youthfully invincible from hangovers and never even heard of the word retinol.

I joined Caboozing in its second year, 2004. I was a few years out of college, underemployed and recently dumped, and searching for a new sense of self at the bottom of every PBR can. I spent the entire weekend in a swimsuit and shorts, dunking in the river and digging my toes into the sand, getting deeply tanned, and laughing with my friends as we created new inside jokes and “you had to be there” stories. By Sunday morning I was sunburnt, riddled in bug bites, deeply hungover, and absolutely giddy over how much fun I’d had, dazzled by the possibility of what life could be, filled with adventures with friends.

That Sunday morning we took over a large corner booth in a Denny’s in Madison, claiming the area with our campfire stink and roiling laughter. My cheeks were lobster red and a bee sting throbbed in the small of my back, and I couldn’t be happier.  It was the start of a love affair with the river, the region, the fun that could be had on a perfect summer day spent with good friends who make you laugh till your face hurts. 

In the earliest years, shenanigans always ensued—canoes overturned for no reason (just kidding, it was drunkenness), drinking games involved chugging Mad Dog on a sandbar in the hot sun, and flip cup games were highly competitive. For sustenance, we scarfed Lunchables on the river and cooked brats back at camp long after getting too inebriated to deal with charcoal and lighter fluid. 

Twenty-plus years of doing any one thing creates its own lore, and those of us who have been around since the beginning are the lore keepers.  There was the year that a small helicopter landed on our sandbar and scooped up one of our friends for a ride, and we weren’t fully sure whether she had just been kidnapped. Or the year that the campgrounds installed a fancy new custom wooden trailer with toilets, when overnight a young child accidentally locked herself into one of the stalls, prompting a rescue that involved sledgehammers smashing in a door at 1am (henceforth known as the Baby Jessica year). Or the year that the river rose dramatically overnight, causing our campsite to flood until our fire was surrounded by a small lake. There have been some absolute drunken shitshows that I will refrain from mentioning here in case one of us runs for office someday. 

Our biggest year topped out at sixty caboozers, with dozens of tents stretched down the river bank. But over the years, our annual numbers ebbed and flowed with the typical patterns of growing up and getting older. Some friends moved out of the state, began raising families, or dealt with health issues. All things that felt a million miles away as I sat in that Denny’s booth laughing with my friends that first summer.

Having an annual tradition like Caboozing is part of the glue that has kept our friend group tight for two decades. It’s a pleasure to welcome back out-of-town friends who traveled in for the weekend or re-emerged from parenthood once the babies got bigger. We sit in a circle around the campfire in the same exact spot as our twenty-something-year-old selves, sharing the same belly laughs and inside jokes, sharing our lore with our newest members. 

Two more ways the Wisconsin River became intertwined with my life: in 2012, we picked up a foster-to-adopt rescue dog on our way home from caboozing and named her River. And in 2014, Kurt and I got married behind the bar that outfits our annual canoe trip. So, yeah, it means a lot to me.

With summer winding down, I already feel a little bit homesick for my favorite river and lakes. They each hold decades of memories, and they are two places in which I’ve never felt lonely. On a hard day when I’m lost in anxiety, or toughing through a Chicago polar vortex, I can look back on those old photos and slip into the sun-drenched memory of being there, on the lake or the river, and find myself again.  

It’s wild how deeply you can love a place. Though in both cases, it’s the people that I return to each spot with, year after year, that make the experience of being there so unforgettable.

What places hold meaning for you? Tell me in the comments!