"Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them."  ~Bill Vaughn, quoted in Jon Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon, 1987


When I was a kid, we found a pristine lake about twenty miles from the house. The waters were cool and inviting on hot Florida afternoons and hinted of unseen things. The woods carried the hauntings of Limpkins scattered through the longleaf pines and the thoughts of deer written in scatterings of prints in the sandy soil.

If you were hungry, you could catch a spotted bass or reach into a saw palmetto and pull out a snake, though usually we just brought sandwiches from home, old traditional favorites like bologna and mustard on white bread or guava jelly and peanut butter on white bread.

I learned to swim in this lake. When I grew older, the city moved its advanced swimming classes to the freshly-built city pools, and I found it difficult to transition to a swimming hole with hard edges and chlorine.

When people asked us how to get to the lake, we told them to take the patched road into the middle of nowhere, but to gas up the car before leaving in case they got lost. The first service station on the narrow Macadan road to the lake was innocent and handy and a great place to buy bait. Friendly people ran the place and they tended to remember us from one visit to the next.

Those gas pumps were the first sign of the changing times. Like powerful magnets, they attracted more cars and the people who drove those cars tended to complain more and more as time went by about the fact that the road was narrow and that there weren't any good places with chairs and tables and air conditioning when guava jelly and peanut butter on white bread became tiresome.

The new road was the sign of more things to come, and what came were the kind of people who wanted to build a house on the shore of the lake where a couple of acres of cleared-out pines looked like an open wound to those who still swam in the lake. But those wounds were private and fenced and had mail boxes with names like SMITH and THE COOPERS and LAZY ACRES. In a few short years, the lake was ringed with houses where nobody remembered Limpkins and deer and the long-ago sound of the wind through the spikes of the palmetto that once grew there. Having your piece of the lake was, as they said, the cat's pajamas.

The city captured that lake and transformed it via various forms of negligence into a lake in spirit only. Some say it's better that way because in the old days it was lonely and far away and probably dangerous even if you didn't get lost or bitten by something. Others claim the close noose of civilization that tightly hugs the water's edge has brought to the lake the benefits of WiFi and manicured hedges and streetlights and lush green lawns and sweetly curtained windows with a sanitized view and everything else one could possibly want to keep nature where it belongs: that is to say, farther away where nowhere still exists.

On Earth Day Eve, I think of the lake when it was a lake.


Writer's Inspiration and Trivial Pursuits
Copyright (c) 2003-2011 by Malcolm R. Campbell. Some images copyright (c) 2003-2011 by www.clipart.com.
"Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman."
--Nancy Banks-Smith
"A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."
--John Milton

The world is a dangerous place to live - not because of the people who are evil but because of the people who don't do anything about it.
--Albert Einstein"

Many a fervid man writes books as cold and flat as graveyard stones.
--Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Mama don’t allow no risqué readin’ round here,

I say that Mama don’t allow no risqué readin’ round here,

Well, we don’t care what Mama don’t allow,

Gonna read ‘neath our blankets anyhow,

Mama don’t allow no risqué readin’ round here.



Mama don’t allow no Peyton Place ‘round here,

I say that Mama don’t allow no Grace Metalious ‘round here,

Well, we don’t care what Mama don’t allow,

Gonna read about Constance MacKenzie anyhow,

Mama don’t allow no risque readin’ round here.



Mama don’t allow no Henry Fielding ‘round here,

I say that Mama don’t allow books with bastards ‘round here,

Well, we don’t care what Mama don’t allow,

Gonna read about Tom and Sophia anyhow,

Mama don’t allow no risqué readin’ ‘round here.



Mama don’t allow no beat generation ‘round here,

I say that Mama don’t allow no beat generation ‘round here,

Well, we don’t care what Mama don’t allow,

Gonna read Kerouac, Bangs and Brautigan anyhow,

Mama don’t allow no risqué readin’ ‘round here.



Now Mama’s long gone and we’re still readin’ ‘round here,

I say Mama’s long gone and we still read what she don’t allow,

Because we don’t care what Mama don’t allow,

Gonna read what’s risqué ‘cause Mama taught us how,

And remember Mama fondly anyhow from year to year to year.


Cool Links

Memories of a lake from my childhood
On Mother's Day: Remembering What Mama Don't Allow
Why aren’t you writing? You don’t know what to write? It doesn’t matter.

Write anyway. Place one word, any word, on the page. A single word. That’s all it takes.

That single word, whatever it is, will launch you on a journey into your creativity and beyond your imagination.

--Mark David Gerson, web log entry, from the author of "The Voice of the Muse"

"If there is one single principle that is central to making any story more powerful, it is simply this: Raise the stakes.

--Donald Maass, in Writing the Breakout Novel