Lakehills Lament
written by: Maryna Imas
Her dad starts the grill with a Click-N-Flame lighter. The Texas heat is unbearable, and the ride up here in his electric buggy got sand stuck in my hair and plastered to my sunscreen. We might be about 3 miles from the nearest point of cellular reception, a short tumble downhill from their summer home with their cabled internet. We sit on collapsible blue tarp chairs and sip on – yeah, well, Buds. My colleague, a fellow teacher, invited me to her “shrine of childhood,” a spot of nostalgia and summer revelry, to clear my ever-darkening mood. “My dad has heard all about you; there’s a lake we could swim in; it’s a chance to just chill out; he’ll BBQ some cuts he marinated; we’ll ride the heat wave out together; I’ll let you feed corncobs to the wild deer when they stray into the yard.” The school year has been tough, my boyfriend ran off with his parents to Vegas, and I was happy for any facsimile of family this dry and foreign state could provide me – my own stuck somewhere on refugee trains across the ocean.
The sandy ledge on which we are sitting drops off about 40 feet. Beneath and beyond – a crater, bigger than what my mind wants to accept, circular lines bleached into its walls. At the bottom, a thin sheen of shallow grey water sloshes about, and some rusty bay boat bobs up and down on it.
“A quarry?” I ask, eyebrow raised.
“Nah, used to be a real lake,” she answers.
“A reservoir, to be exact,” her dad corrects her from behind the portable grill, swinging a sausage in his tongs. “Dug it back in the 20’s to irrigate the farms around the Bexar County.”
“It used to be bigger, you know,” she apologizes.
“Yeah, she’d rush here skinny dipping every afternoon when she was little,” her dad chuckles.
“And then your mama would come down and bring your green swimsuit and inflatable dragon, so you don’t scare the fishing folk like a heathen.” She sounds a half-hearted grump.
“And then you’d wade in the shoals and look for snails and newts and carry those little fuckers home, and I’d find them in the family bathroom the next morning.”
At this point, I’m wiping tears of laughter from the corners of my eyes. Maxine tsks next to me playfully, settles down into her chair with a content smile.
“Your Uncle Frank and I would go out fishing on the lake – bass, catfish, carp – we got a permit, and I’d saved up for the boat for a year – big ole fish, y’know?” He indicates a size with his arms, sausage still flapping.
“I bet,” I say indulgingly.
I look at the arid landscape before me. Lake Medina’s water levels have fallen below 5% capacity in 2022. The Southern Drought has taken most of it around 10 years ago, and the heat waves and the land use of the following years have skimmed more and more off the top. On the opposite side of the crater, I see some empty oil drums come up on shore.
“Any more fishing done here today?” I ask.
“Hardly. They’ve kept this last one boat ramp open, but that’s it. Lots of fish died off these three years due to salinity. There were some showers back in March, we’d thought it’d help, but really…” he vacillates, shakes his hand in an uncertain gesture, then gives up.
“It’s a pity,” Maxine adds.
“Sure is! The fish, and the birds, of course, egrets and herons, they left with no food around.”
Grill finally done, he takes a seat next to us. The sun is beginning to set over the horizon, and the mosquitos are upon us.
“Y’know, the whole reason Alice – Maxine’s mom – and I bought this house was because of the lake. When Max was just born, we wanted a place to go out on the weekend, to spend time together in, to teach the kids about nature. Alice was looking northeast, in Comal, but this… the lake, it sold it for us. You’d walk out here in the evening and know – this is the family haven. Now that Alice has got cancer, she comes and frets over the house and the yard like a madwoman. She refused to sell it to pay for treatment, even though most neighbors have already left. Lakehills is basically a ghost town.”
I watch Maxine lean her head on her dad’s shoulder, and he ruffles her hair with one hand. Ever since her big break-up, she’s been coming up here a lot more to spend time with her parents, to bask in the nostalgia. I sip on my beer quietly and look at this place through the hazy twilight – a place so different from the one in her memories. I think of back home – fields that must be pock-marked with explosions, natural reserves swept off by overflowing rivers from blown-up dams. I haven’t been back there in 3 years, and the war must have changed the landscape beyond recognition. And I think about how similar it is – to watch a place you call home disappear, life stripped away from nature by human hands.
We mourn – each his own loss – with beer and sausages, and never get to see the wild deer. I guess they have run away too.
- Lakehills Lament - September 25, 2024
- A Visit - June 25, 2024
