Overall, White enjoys this vacation with his son and, although there have been some noticeable changes around the camp, he is able to maintain the illusion that he has assumed the place of his father and returned to his childhood. Seeing his son’s desire to master the outboard motor, White recalls the tricks one could perform with a one-cylinder motor if they “got really close to it spiritually” (4). He contrasts these engines with the one-cylinder boat engines that fascinated him as a child. Eventually, White and his son go up to a farmhouse where they are served dinner by young women who appear to be “the same country girls” (3) who have always worked at the farmhouse.Īfter reflecting on the virtues of summer vacation and the “jollity and peace and goodness” (3) that characterize his memories of the camp, White pinpoints the appearance of outboard motorboats as the quality that most spoils the illusion of a return to his youth.
After catching a couple of bass, the two go for a swim, and White takes note of the other camp-goers, who look to him exactly the same as the camp-goers he remembers from his youth. This notion persists as the two go fishing for bass, and White feels convinced “that everything was as it always had been, that the years were a mirage and there had been no years” (2). Settling into the vacation, White is struck by a strange sensation: “I began to sustain the illusion that was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father” (2). He finds that the paved road does, indeed, extend nearly all the way to the lake but is delighted to find that the campsite is more or less the same as he remembers. On his way to the lake, White wonders “how time would have marred” the campsite and whether “tarred road would have found it out” (1). Although his family’s annual visits to the lake are well in the past, White finds himself yearning to go back and plans a vacation with his son. Despite a few hiccups, “the vacation was a success and from then on none of ever thought there was any place in the world like that lake” (1). White begins by describing his family’s first visit to the lake in 1904, when he was five.
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