Summer is a time for making memories. This is an early-and a favorite–one of mine.
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The path from the bungalow colony to the lake isn’t technically a path: It’s wide enough for the Good Humor truck to carefully wend its way through the woods, past the pines and the beech trees, bells jingling all the way, so that by the time it reaches the water’s edge, there is a bevy of swim-suited, sun-kissed children, all clutching dimes in their sandy palms, jostling to be first in line.
But it’s called “the path,” and–for as long as any of the grandchildren of the immigrants who have captured a tiny piece of the American Dream in the form of summer bungalows at Lake Mohegan can remember—it has presented a recurring initiation rite that is as much a part of summer as orange Creamsicles and Coppertone.
The rite technically starts on Donald Court, a graveled, dead-end street with ten bungalows—a colony– owned by the butchers and bakers and liquor store proprietors who spend the workweek in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens and who join their families on Friday nights, bearing brown paper sacks filled with T-bone steaks, and rugelach, and schnapps from “the City,” and on Saturdays the air is filled with the click, click, click of push mowers and the proud smell of newly-cut grass. But most of the children, who range from about seven to early teens, have learned to avoid the road by darting across neighbors’ yards until they reach Uncas Street–named for the sachem of the Mohegans, on whose purloined land the colony is now situated–which presents only a brief discomfort for the kids as they dash across, with minimum contact of feet to hot asphalt.
Someone—probably by a vote of the board of the Amazon Beach Colony, peopled by all the bungalow owners at that end of the lake–once thought it was a good idea to pour gravel all the way along the length of the steep path, but time and weather and gravity have left a rutted trail with sharp pebbles poking up from the earth, and it is these pebbles that present the test to tender winter feet. For no kid wears shoes on the path. By the end of the summer, those young feet will be callused and feeling no pain, but in early July, you don’t dare cry out or even wince when the pebbles pierce instep or heel. And it’s lucky that in those pre-helicopter parenting days, the kids are allowed to go to the lake by themselves. There is, after all, a college-boy lifeguard. If their mothers had accompanied them, they would have had to wear shoes, for sure.
And then one summer—probably also by a vote of the board of the Amazon Beach Colony—a new path—parallel to and about twenty yards from the old one– is cut through the woods. This path is paved and welcomed not only by the baby-toting mothers and grandmothers of the colony, who come down to the lake to “bathe”–never swim—and then play gin rummy in the late afternoons, but by the Good Humor man, as well.
The kids, however, continue to use the old path. It wouldn’t be summer without it.
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