For the last 20 years, a tiny 1 by 1 ½ inch picture frame has sat on my desk. It is silver with tiny etched decorative edges. Inside is an old picture taken with my Kodak 110 in the early 1980's. The picture is of a young girl smiling warmly. Her eyes are gazing directly at you, at ease and happy.
In the middle of the summer, all the teens would pack up into the church vans. With the brave youth leaders and chaperones in tow, we'd head to Huntington Lake for a week. Huntington Lake is in the High Sierras somewhere near Fresno. Our accommodations were tents set up on concrete slabs. The beds consisted of tired mattresses laying on standing (mostly sprung) bedsprings. This was the coolest youth retreat you could go to. The drive was long and always a drag, but once we pulled up to the entrance and saw the Huntington Lake General Store, our energy soared.
Huntington is a large beautiful lake. We would jump into the clear lake, slightly tense, knowing we'd feel a old jolt when we landed. Meanwhile, the lake dock was a hub of activity and, of course, we had inner tubes we floated and paddled on the water.
I remember distinctly that Anita and I would paddle our inner tubes up this one particular stream as far as we could. We saw fish moving below us guardedly. We maneuvered around rocks and fallen trees, continuing our way farther and further up. We felt like pioneers. We were explorers. We were certain no one had traveled up this stream like we had. We were discoverers.
One afternoon when Anita & I tired of laying on the docks with the other teens, we looked for an adventure. Both of us being strong and athletic, we decided to swim along the shore and see where it took us. We swam a long distance—talking, playing and laughing the whole way. We both were like fish—swimming about under water with our eyes wide. We wanted to see everything there was in the underwater world of Huntington Lake. We were discoverers.
We found it in the middle of our swimming adventure. A small rock island rising up out of the lake. It was maybe 200 feet from the shore's edge. This was it. We had made a discovery. We were discoverers!
Anita and I were excited. We were outside the bounds of the dock—out beyond the pale of norm. We swam fast and quick. We would dive down and look at the mysterious and beautiful rock formations. We imagined we saw whale forms or sunken ships in the rocks. We crawled up onto the warm rocks of the island and soaked up the heat of the sun. The light was bright, but also quite clear. Before, I had often thought that summer sun often dulls and blurs your vision. Instead, this sunlight made everything detailed and vivid. We spent hours alternately resting, then exploring every side, nook and cranny of our island. We claimed it in our names. It was our island discovery.
We decided it was time to head back to the docks. Still excited, but now with a trace of sadness, we dove off the edge of the island's rock edges and swam. When we found everyone back at the docks, they asked where we had been. We told them we swam following the shore's edge, but deliberately didn't elaborate much on our island discovery. Just like we claimed the island for our own, we claimed our memory for our own as well.
Years later, Anita gave me a story she wrote in her senior Literature class. It was the story of our time on the island. It was beautiful. As I read, I swam again with her around the island. I felt our joy and shared loss of leaving the island behind.
