The Fourth Lake Trip of 1968

by Pat
(Saco, Maine, USA)

My family generally got along great when I was growing up and we often took a family vacation to a lake in Downeast Maine. In fact, we went just about every summer when I was growing up. This was rustic camping, but we did have a cabin. However, there was no bathroom inside the cabin and the only running water was from a pump that had to be primed when we arrived.

The refrigerator was a gas refrigerator, and we may have had to bring a new gas can with us in some years. There was a generator in later years to run lights, but in the beginning the only source of light in the evening was gas lights. As a kid, this was my favorite week of the summer, and it was a time when we truly bonded as a family.

In 1968, we arrived at the bottom of the lake after traveling for more than 5 hours, 40 miles of that being dirt road. We then loaded all of our gear into the big barge that we used as a boat. It was an old army barge. It was late in the evening, and the lake was covered with fog. You could not see much more than about 10 feet in front of you.

To top it all off, the motor would not start, and so we had to wait for nearly an hour while my dad got it going. It is times like this that really test the relationships in the family. The next morning, as we looked out on the lake from inside the cabin, our family ate a large breakfast together and talked about the exciting trip down the lake.