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

something I can’t forget? What’ll I do then?” I could only come up with, “Just remember as much as you can for the rest of your life.” Paul started to walk away. He didn’t look back; I looked back, then ran and caught up with my friend. “What I think’s best,” Paul said, “is to give people their privacy.” I thought it was the most adult, dignified thing I’d ever heard.
    The following Monday, an “exercise in description” was due in Miss Woods’s English class. I worked on mine for hours over the weekend, typing version after version on the Olivetti. On Tuesday before English class, the last period of the day, Miss Woods asked for a private conference. So I stayed after, and she said, “I want to speak with you about your three pages of description. First, let me point out that I only asked for two pages. You got a little carried away. That meant I had to read more of your writing than anyone else’s. But okay. All right. That’s not a crime, is it?
    â€œThe assignment was to provide a description of anything you wanted and to give what you write a lot of thought. And I think your writing is excellent. But I took note of a few things. Let me see here . . . Oh, yes, here on page two. Where you write how this teacher and this policeman—let me quote you—‘entwined their clothes in knots before they jumped into the river.’ Let’s examine this sentence. You really don’t need the word
entwined
to describe knots, do you? Knots are by definition entwined, aren’t they? Now, I won’t tell the principal you were skipping school. That would be hypocritical of me. Fine, then. Now that we have an understanding, I’ll trust you to keep my truancy to yourself—and I’ll do the same for you. Both of us will have to live with the fact that we skipped school on an unbearably hot day and ended up at the same swimming hole. Funny how life is. All right, you’re free to go now. By the way, I haven’t breathed a word about this to my fiancé. You remember he’s a policeman, right?”
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    As for Reeds Lake in the summertime, its nocturnal waters, moonlight, starlight, and especially the trumpeter swans ghosting along the hull of the paddle-wheel steamer, seldom failed to provide a reprieve from a fifteen-year-old’s operatic despairs. Also, I found it was a place where I could think things through. Not that I ever succeeded in thinking anything through to perfect clarity, or even usefulness, but I was aware of trying to. In essence I went to the lake to think. And to slip into the water and dog-paddle a few yards behind the swans, I suppose daring them to turn and unfold with startling velocity those S-curved necks and strike me with their beaks. That had happened only once, when I was caught unawares, daydreaming at night near the paddle wheeler, and a swan was right there and it was too late to swim away or dive underwater. For a week I had a bruise risen black-and-blue above my right eye. I might’ve been blinded by a swan, which would at least have been unique. Apart from that skirmish, I always had the rarest sense of a peaceful heart at Reeds Lake. Yet the most magical times for me were whenever enough gulls—they migrated from Lake Michigan—gathered on the paddle wheeler, so that the shifting weight of them would make the boat begin to turn, if only a foot or two at most. I always hated to leave that place. Every time, I hated to leave.
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    After studying
North American Indian Waterfowl Traps, Weirs, and Snares
for five or six nights in a row, I felt prepared to apply my one-book scholarship to the real thing. At a hardware store I purchased strips of balsa wood, framing wood, nails, twine, and a length of window screen for the trap’s walls (my use of the wire screen was cheating a little in authenticity). Water weeds, for camouflage, I found at Reeds Lake.