I’m reminiscing in this travel essay. When I was a child, my parents and extended family rented a lakeside lodge in Jamaica Point, Maine for two summers. I was maybe nine or ten when we first got it. I always wished we could have continued going, but the owners sold a few summers later and the new owners tripled the price.
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lakeside lodge in jamaica point, maine
The road wended through the pines as if choosing the path of least resistance between the huge trees. A turn here and soon after a turn there. The car bumped over the dirt road – tree roots, rocks – and then the lake was there. A small parking area sat to the left; the house sat to the right. It was a large house, an old fishing lodge. There was a big porch with wide steps and a big wooden door.
Inside was an exploratory kid’s paradise. There was a tiny room with a ping pong table and a big safe. Another room had a pool table and a small bathroom, where my Aunt Nancy permed her hair and stunk the place up. Through to the left though, was a huge living and dining room, and to that right of that was a huge kitchen. It was meant for a restaurant – there were two fridges, two stoves, two ovens and a lot of counter space. There was a tiny back door too, that led outside to the woods, and where we would take the trash out after dinner.
In the front of the house, by the door, was a wide wooden staircase that bent its way up to the second floor, where eight or nine bedrooms lined the narrow hallway. Some rooms had double beds (the parents had dibs on those,) some rooms had single beds, where us kids camped out.
I don’t really remember much about the bedrooms. What I do remember is the lobster dinners, the ski-doos, the canoes, and the friends we made with the kids around the “corner.” (Our cove led out into the big lake, and these kids lived around the point. I don’t remember their names!)
I also remember the sheer blackness of the nights, when we would drag out blankets to the grass-covered point and stargaze, hoping for meteors. I remember fishing. I never caught much, but my uncle did catch my little toe on his fishhook. It scarred me so much, I didn’t hold a fishing rod until I spent summers in Alaska twenty years later. And I remember when my uncle took the ski-doo out and got stranded in the middle of the lake. My mom and aunt headed out in a canoe to find him; he was towed back to the lodge by a local fishing boat.
There’s that time my mom and grandma prepared to go out in a canoe, but the canoe moved away from the dock as my grandma tried to step in. She ended up falling right between the two into the middle of the lake. The endless afternoons swimming in the calm water. The way that the lake grass tickled my feet as I paddled out to my mermaid rock.
I remember the time I sat on the porch with all the other kids, telling them a scary story that scared me half to death too. There was an island across the lake from us, full of mystery to my childhood mind. Late one night as the summer sun set, I wove a story about witches that spent a week on the island during the new moon.
It’s a childhood memory, which can be the best. Jamaica Point will always hold a special place in my heart.