Lake
I Sayed it!
Lost Lake has been our family favorite since Marm introduced it to me shortly after we were married. All of the kids have grown up on its shores, and innumerable adventures and escapades there have dotted our family timeline.
This pristine lake is a magical place where no boat motor touches it. It’s water is crystal clear and COLD if you venture in too early in the season. Mt Hood towers as its backdrop and it’s encircled by beautiful Pacific Northwest forest and fauna.
There is camping, hiking, fishing, swimming, and boating with various non-motor options. The best for me however, is snorkeling. Almost from the first time I saw the lake I wanted to snorkel in it. I had never snorkeled before, but I did here. Boy howdy, did I snorkel here! (More on that in future posts.)
In the earlier years when the kids were small I would spend hours in the water finding crawdads. I would search up and down the shoreline poking under the rocks in the shallower warmer water, or dive down as far as 20 feet to overturn a log on the lake bottom. It was here on the bottom that the monstrous leviathan dwelt. I would bring back the best prizes of the dive and show them to the kids. They would clap and cheer, squeal and run up to see them more closely. They wanted to hold them, but would scream and run away when they wiggled their legs at them. Once I caught one that was as big as a small crab. No fish story here. It was huge. I had a serious aversion to getting pinched by that big boy. No… thank you!
One summer we stayed a full week in the cabins during our family vacation. Like usual we were all spending the day together down along the beach in one of our favorite spots. The water had warmed nicely from the weeks of summer sunshine and I was out snorkeling around in search of the elusive creatures.
While the kids were playing on the beach, Annie and Aaron kept looking into the old metal coffee pot where we housed the captive crawdads. Annie was five and Aaron was almost three at the time. They kept taking peeks at the two or three wee beasties that were all meshed up together in a churning ball of pincers and antennae inside the pot. They were obsessed with them and couldn’t leave them alone.
While they were taking their peeks in the pot, Annie had been trying to get Aaron to say “crawdad”. For whatever reason he would not or could not say the word. Then, suddenly, out of the blue, he mumbled his toddler version of it.
He looked up with the biggest, sweetest grin on his face and shyly proclaimed with glowing three-year old pride, ”I sayed it!”.
That was it for us. That was the moment of the day. Everything else paled in comparison and those three words have been immortalized in our family ever since.
“I sayed it!”
Yes son, you surely did “sayed it”.
Curls & Capes 