Cooling off on a hot summer day at Limekiln Lake

 

It was a humid July morning on Limekiln Lake and I decided to take my dog Mutt for a swim. I rolled out the old truck tire inner tube from the garage and shouted, “Do ya wanna go for a walk?”

Mutt wagged her tail so fiercely that her entire body began to convulse. I reckoned that she was more than happy to join me.

I skipped around to the back of the house to the clothesline where I had hung my beach towel the day before.

It was a bit damp from the morning dew, but I pulled it from the line anyway.

I draped it around my neck, grabbed my tube and began rolling it down the hill. Mutt nipped at it as we moved along. Every nose poke made it wobble in a different direction.

I rolled up my towel and used it like a whip to help balance the other side so it would head straight down the roadway.

I lost control of it and it careened over the shoulder of the road, down the hill and into the lake.

Mutt, in hot pursuit, followed it into the water.

I tossed my towel over a white pine log and peeled off my socks and sneakers. I slowly waded out into the dark black water and belly-flopped onto the tube.

With just a few paddles and kicks I found myself well away from the shore. Mutt swam around in circles as if she was looking for something on the water’s surface.

She tried to climb up on the tube a couple times but could only manage to get her front paws on-board.

I could see that she was tiring, so I grabbed her by the collar and pulled her up.

We floated along until she decided she had had enough and scrambled off.

As I followed her back to the shore, I noticed a build-up of yellowish foam along the shoreline.

When my tube eventually bobbed onto the sand, some of the foam was clinging to the surface of my floating island.

I swirled my finger into the foamy mass. Unlike those in my bubble bath, the bubbles seemed to be more resilient—and much dirtier.

All of a sudden Mutt splashed up beside me and laid down in the water.

I could tell by her stance that she wanted me to throw her a stick, so I flipped out of the tube and searched for one worthy of a game of fetch.

I found a good one and flung it out in the water as far as I could. As I awaited Mutt’s dutiful return, I poked my toes into the frothy mass that had accumulated along the shoreline.

Lake foam was a pretty cool thing for a boy growing up Adirondack.

 

Mitch Lee, Adirondack native & storyteller,

lives at Big Moose Lake.ltmitch3rdny@aol.com