Dating : Thrown Up

Lake Stories

Flying Above The Water

The summer was in full swing, each day the sun seemed bigger and brighter. The school year had only just ended, already a distant memory in our minds, it’s beginning was nowhere near our thoughts. Today was just another day to spend on the lake, and those days felt endless as we walked. Allen and Malcolm coming to my house, then we would walk to Rico’s place up the street, and finally cut over to the lake at the northeast corner and on to Dillard’s dock. Once we were there we might whistle a couple of times and Mino would come out, or he would see us once we started and swim over. He was the only one that lived on the dock and we all thought he was so lucky for it.

We always met at Dillard’s dock, the best and newest one on the lake, replacing the nasty old one that had been there about a year after I moved into the neighborhood and who knows how long it was there before that. The new dock was built for having fun. It floated! Being made of some kind of styrofoam, wrapped in what looked like aluminum siding and topped with smooth, splinterless, even planks of some kind of wood, it was just slippery enough when wet, super stable, and pretty big. Square at the end of a longer runway, it was out past the dropoff, over water at least twenty feet deep. We had such good times on that dock, so many stories I could tell.

Today was strangely slow, maybe it was the sun beaming down on us, but none of our normal games grabbed our attention. We were just hanging off the sides, relaxing in our absence of any responsibility, cooling ourselves off from any worry, not a care in the world. Almost bored really, and that’s fine when you’re young and have nothing to do but waste away the daylight. The water was cool, as long as we kept splashing water onto the dock from time to time it stayed wet and cool. Not a bad way to spend a couple of hours. It was maybe an hour or two after we go there when we saw three, grown men, at least in their mid to upper twenties, coming out toward’s Howard’s dock. They were coming from the house we had cut through to come over to the lake, the same way we always came.

We recognized Vance right off, he was like six foot six and muscled, always had long hair and a mustache and beard. His two buddies seemed to be about the same age, slightly shorter but just as muscled. Both were blond with long hair. As they got closer we got nervous thinking Vance was going to rag us for cutting across his property, which would have been odd since he never really cared before. They reached the dock runway and after nodding to us he and his buddies walked to the end of the dock and dived in. It seemed like ten minutes passed before they came back up and they were like half-way across the lake. It was amazing! How could anyone do that, let alone three guys at the same time? They must have been champion divers or something.

Anyway, that was all we needed, seeing them do that provoked us to try to do the same. While they continued their swim across the long length of the lake, we started diving off the end and seeing how far we could get before coming up for air. Our attempts were nowhere close to what they could do, and after a couple more tries, we started playing dock tag. Pretty soon we had all but forgotten about the three aquamen and were well into our own thing when we noticed they had begun swimming back to the dock. When they got back, they pulled themselves onto the dock and laid there a bit to catch their breath.

Like good adolescents trying to impress older guys, we started playing “Last Man On The Dock”, which basically meant pushing and pulling on each other until we pushed everyone off the dock except one. As you were shoved into the water you jumped right back out and back into the melee. Sometimes it looked like a little rugby scrum as we all pushed on each other, looking for someone weakening so we could concentrate there and rush them into the water. At one point as we were shoving on each other we felt a big push and all of us tumbled into the lake. Vance had gotten in on it and pushed us all in. When we came out, we saw his buddies trying to get him in. We trod water in awe as we saw these powerful men playing the same game we were playing just seconds ago. It was awesome. Soon they were all in the water. No sooner had they come up than they were making their way back onto the dock, and so did we. Arms wringing, legs straining, bodies slipping, a bunch of kids, some much bigger than others, working to wrestle everyone else into the water. More often than not Vance was the last one on the dock, but every now and then one of my buddies stayed on top, too small and slippery to be pulled in.

Suddenly, things took a different turn. One of Vance’s friends, after struggling to keep a grip on a very slippery Allen, just threw his arms around him and flung him threw the air and into the water. We all kind of watched with our mouths open, that was a total violation of the rules! Allen broke through the water laughing out loud. Soon the three men grabbed the remaining boys on the dock and flung them into the water. The game had changed. As we came up from the water, we were flung back in. Things changed again, two of them would grab one of us and swing us back and forth a couple of times and hurl us into the air. Now we were waiting our turn, the men tossing us like dolls as if we weighed next to nothing. They were very strong, able to launch us so very high into the air. I remember turning over and over, spinning in the air, sometimes catching glimpses of the lake seemingly moving away from me, becoming smaller as I went further and further up into the air. Exhilaration and joy, panicked happiness as I laughed in fear, moving away from the earth, realizing how high I must have been thrown, not able to breath, feeling time slow down, no one there that I can remember when I glimpsed the lake moving away from me, reaching the height of an arc that seemed to hold me high up in the air for a long moment, then crashing back down, happy and joyful and positive that it would happen again, waiting my turn to be thrown away from the earth and come back down.

After a while, they must have grown tired, or maybe bored, but it ended. We all laid back on the dock for a while catching our breath, soaking in the sun, drying off. Soon they got up, said goodbye, and walked back to Vance’s place. My friends and I stayed on the dock, looking up at the sky, remembering how much closer we had gotten to it just moments ago. Tossing and turning, feeling weightless and free. That was a day to remember, and a great start to the summer.

I look back now with happiness and sadness, as nothing seems to quite match that experience in its intensity, its visceral impact on my nervous system, the imprint it left on my mind. A vivid memory, burning in the feeling of leaving the ground and coming back down. We flew over the lake that day, thrown up by the strength of sheer playfulness, where age didn’t matter and we were all boys having fun.