Pulling Up Stakes

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It is all we can do to wait till nightfall so we can scavenge wood and start a fire and cook our popcorn just like we imagine all the other families do on camping trips.

After miles of freeways and highways and dusty country roads, we finally land in a little trailer my father borrows from a friend, just a few miles from a brown body of water called, for some reason, Clear Lake. With no water or electricity, my parents camp in the trailer, and we pitch the tent alongside as a kind of kids' room. We cook and wash outside, with a Coleman stove and buckets of water, and we drive to the lake to swim and cool off and use the public restrooms. Every once in a while-like when the whole family gets poison oak-we go to the other side of the lake, where they have a beach and a campground and a shower.

Other than the corner of Sixteenth and Sanchez in San Francisco, Clear Lake is the best place a kid could live. We spend all day in shorts and bathing suits, wandering back and forth between water and land. We turn over boulders, logs, and old tires to look for salamanders and potato bugs. We collect apricot pits and use them like coins to buy stuff off each other. We rearrange the rocks on the beach to create forts and moats and channels and deltas. We dig our toes into the mud bottom, feeling for clams, then use those squishy lumps to catch bluegill and crappie. We pull those fish up and grab them behind the head, where the sharp back fins can't prick us. Then we look for a good long while at their round, startled eyes, at our hands gripping something beautiful and wild and helpless. And then we toss them back into the water with a splash.

Summer went on and on, for three, four, five months. My parents read the want ads, then dropped us off at the lake with cheese sandwiches while they drove around looking for work and for that little piece of Land. At the lake my brothers and I learned how to ration the food to make it last all day, and how to make friends with families who had coolers and inner tubes and bright plastic buckets with matching shovels. We learned to do the backstroke and the dead man's float, to talk underwater, to flip the canoe over and then back, to repair the rafts with duct tape or chewing gum until Dad could do it the right way, with glue and a rubber patch. I outgrew my one-piece bathing suit, sky blue with white clouds, so my mother cut it into a two-piece, sewing a drawstring into the top and bottom seams. We gathered walnuts off the ground-they had to be roasted to taste any good-and ate apricots and cherries from farm stands and sometimes even ice cream at Dairy Queen, where the bug zapper flashed loud blue lightning all night long.

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