Summer vacations remembered

Back Home By Chris Hardie

The summer season is winding down, but August was usually the month for our family vacations – which were difficult to come by when you lived on a dairy farm.

It was a month after the second cutting of hay and before school started, so my parents tried to squeeze in a few days of rest and relaxation. For a few years in the mid-1970s, we traveled with my grandparents, who had friends with a cabin on Witters Lake near Wautoma, a 43-acre seepage lake.

My brother, Kevin, did a little fishing, but mainly, it was my grandfather, father and me, who would head out early in the morning and early evening. Grandpa was 65, Dad was 38 and I was 11.

The lake was great for panfish. One evening, we found a hotspot and we took turns helping each other pull the fish in with a net, as they got close to the boat.

I felt tugging on my line and starting to reel it in. My Dad, at the same time, had a bigger tug and felt like he had a large panfish. “Dad,” he said to my grandfather. “I need the net.”

Grandpa started reaching for the net, when he realized that he too had a fish on his line. “Oh s***,” he said. “It’s a fish.”

Dad started laughing, teasing his father about the inconvenience of having a fish on his line. Grandpa and I joined in, and the story was told and retold whenever we were fishing together.

There also was plenty of time for reading and relaxing. At night, there would be card games and endless entertainment, as we watched with amusement, the competitive nature of my grandparents – who did not like to lose.

During a visit to a hardware store in Wautoma, Kevin and I invested $5 each, to buy diving goggles. We used them to see better underwater, and gathered clams and captured a couple of painted turtles that came home with us, and became pets in a child swimming pool we kept on the deck. They even wintered over in our bathtub.

Outside the cabin on Witters Lake, was a ring and hook game. A metal ring about three inches across was suspended from a rope tied to a tree branch. The object of the game was to swing the rope so that the ring would land on a metal hook on a post. I’d spend hours trying to master this simple game, to see how many times it would take to land the ring. Grandpa told me the record was three.

The second year, we came back to the cabin and I ran from the car to see if the ring was still there. Much to my delight, it was still standing. I unhooked it, stood in the spot I had figured out the previous year, and gave it a gentle push. I landed the hook on the first try and had a hard time convincing everyone else I had actually done it.

That was in 1976, the last year we took a cabin vacation to Witters Lake. Kevin graduated in 1978, and the next year, my grandmother died. Life moved on.

I’m sure the old cabin has been torn down or remodeled. But, I often think of it at this time of year, and hope it provided as many memories for others who stayed there.

Chris Hardie spent more than 30 years, as a reporter, editor and publisher. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and won dozens of state and national journalism awards. He is a former president of the Wisconsin Newspaper Association. Contact him at chardie1963@gmail.com.