I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place Read Online Free Page A

didn’t want to wait for the book to go through channels before I could study it. I stopped to sit on a park bench on my way home. After a quick perusal of some of the illustrations, I was hooked. I immediately felt the excitement of trying, as soon as possible, to apply ancient, “well-traveled” techniques of capturing ducks—maybe even a swan—to my almost nightly visits to Reeds Lake in Ramona Park. Reeds Lake was my secret haunt that summer.
    While I wasn’t legally sanctioned to drive until I was sixteen, truth be told I drove a car nearly every night. I’d been anxious to drive. (In the bookmobile I’d read enough of
On the Road
by Jack Kerouac to grasp its hipster restlessness as a possibility for me, say, a year or two down the line. What’s more, I’d secretly put Maynard G. Krebs, the stereotypical beatnik character on
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
, with his goatee, his unkempt clothes, and laid-back cool, in the same light. Kerouac and Krebs were my earliest icons of an independent life.) In fact, I’d already purchased a beat-to-crap 1960 Ford, whose grille had been stove in by a pickup truck and never repaired. I didn’t care. That car represented my future, sitting day and night in my driveway. It had cost $200. Paris Keller helped me out there. I had only mentioned my desire to own it and she loaned me $150. She even went to East Grand Rapids to take it for a test drive, telling the owner she herself was interested in buying it. I suppose that had some truth to it, since she was the one who signed the bill of sale, and, the next day, she transferred the title over to my name. I had no idea how to thank her.
    As often as seven nights a week, I’d wait until my mother was asleep, the radio always on next to her bed (my mother was ever on the alert for tornado warnings; we had a tornado shelter, with a basement entry, stocked with cans of Campbell’s soup and two bottles of whiskey, and some nights my mother slept down there), then I’d drive the thirty or so blocks to Reeds Lake.
    I had practically memorized the driver’s test manual and was careful to stay below the speed limit, hands at ten o’clock and two o’clock on the wheel, navigating the streets to the wealthy section of town. Some people had lakefront houses with wraparound porches and cabin cruisers moored in boat garages. One reason I went to the lake was to swim near the faux Mississippi paddle-wheel steamer, which, a decade earlier, had been the feature attraction of a popular amusement park, but now it was in shabby disrepair, in dry-dock on scaffolding, propped up a few feet out of the water, so on a windy day waves lapped at its hull. Most people I knew preferred to swim at public swimming pools, the more adventuresome ones in the Thornapple River.
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    On an exceedingly hot day during the last weeks of school the previous year, my best friend, Paul Amundson, and I played hooky, walked about three miles to the Thornapple, stripped down, and prepared to go for a swim in the shallows, mostly shrouded by enormous oak and willow trees, on a beautiful stretch of the river. When we stepped out from behind an oak, we heard laughter and playful shouting. We immediately got dressed and investigated, and to our astonishment discovered our English teacher, Kathy Woods, skinnydipping with her fiancé, whom she’d introduced to our after-school creative writing club. “Class,” she’d said, “I’d like you to meet my fiancé, Mr. Williams. He’s a policeman. But he’s extra-special and different, because he writes for newspapers, and he’s writing his own poetry, too. Don’t be afraid to ask questions just because a real writer is visiting, okay?
    Behind the tree, Paul became a little panicky. “We have two choices. We can stay and watch, or we can get out of here fast.” I voted for staying. Paul said, “But what if I see