Travel Essay

    I struggle with the door. It’s old and its knob is hard to twist sometimes, so it takes a little bit of work to open. It takes a couple tries, but I always win. It’s early. Too early for anyone to climb aboard their pontoon boats and drink margaritas in the sun, but not too early for me.
I step out onto the warm, wooden boards of the deck and throw my body against the railing. It looks out over the dock, and the boats that bob in the water. Waves tumble in underneath their hulls and sparkle in the early morning sun. I look up toward the hills and trees that hug the opposite shore.  The way they act as a frame for the glistening water that pulls me into its portrait. I can never resist.
    The inside of our little family hunting camp is a mix of grungy and charming. The old door of the camp leads into a wide family room that always seems to be filled with the crashing of dishes, and yelling, and laughing. The 50 year old stereo blasts classic rock all day and it’s turned down low at night, but guitar riffs and drumlines still hum along with the static carried by “Rock 105”. My cousins and I crowd around the glossy wooden table playing cribbage, a game we forbade the playing of anywhere else, and we lay cards down and count fifteens as we pass the box of lucky charms around.
    We lose track of time and no one sleeps until our eyes are too tired to even see our cards. When we finally do climb into our bunks and zip up our sleeping bags the bunk room is pitch black and all you can see is the soft glow of our phone screens that illuminate our faces.
    I only wake up once my aunt opens up the bunk room door and bangs two pans together. We shovel pancakes and eggs into our mouths and rush out onto the deck where we find our fishing poles still leaning against the railing from late last night. We rush down the steps and begin screaming “NOT IT!” when we realize that we forgot the worms upstairs, but we all know that the youngest will always be the one that has to drag themselves back up the neverending staircase to get them. I am the youngest and I complain but everyone else is already on the dock telling me to hurry up. We cast lines off the dock all morning until the water is still and the fish stop biting by the pointy rock under the trees. One by one we begin jumping into the water and race out to the trampoline that floats about 50 feet away from the shore.
We make it out there and lay in the sun until our skin is dry and our cheeks are sunburnt. I claim I’m too tired to swim back and I clutch onto anyone who will let me. They drag me back to the dock and we climb down onto the beach to skip rocks, something I was never all that good at. We get called back upstairs for dinner and it is quickly decided with full mouths and nodding heads that a trip up to the falls would be a nice idea for tonight.
The blue coolers are quickly packed full of drinks and ice and we find ourselves wrapped in blankets on the leather of our seats, under the pink clouds of the lake.  We watch the splashing of cascading waters under the bridge and we only go home when the drinks are warm and the mosquitos are biting.