Everything in this story is true.
The turmoil of my childhood home life is well documented elsewhere on this site, and readers of my other memoir chapters have good reason to assume it was mostly doom and gloom. But my brother and I still managed to make the best of things and have fun where it could be found. There were benefits to being a neglected child in the 1970s — sure there was nobody taking care of us much of the time, but we were also free to get up to whatever type of shenanigans made themselves available to us. We made a lot of our own entertainment, from building forts out of scrap materials scavenged from nearby lumberyard dumpsters to breaking into abandoned (and sometimes not so abandoned) buildings.
The best times, however, often came courtesy of our doting grandparents. Despite the poverty and instability in our house, my grandmother was forever swooping in deus ex machina style, making sure Chris and I got to the dentist for fluoride treatments every six months, buying us new school clothes and shoes, giving us the best presents every Christmas — and above all else, taking us along with her and Grandpa for a week’s vacation every summer. That one glorious week each year, invariably spent at Grand Lake o’ the Cherokees, made the other 51 bearable.
My grandparents and their people had been going down there since the 1950s, enjoying the fine fishing and reasonably-priced accommodations. I can’t tell you how many times over the years I heard my grandmother express her regret for once passing up a good deal on some lakeside property — on the site that later became Shangri-La, the fanciest spot on the whole lake. But I think my granddad was plenty happy to rent a place and not have to worry about it the rest of the year.
So by the time I was born, it had already been long customary for the olds to head down to Grove, Oklahoma — roughly a three-hour drive from our hometown just over the Kansas line — right around the last week of June into the first week of July. There they would meet other members of my grandmother’s extended family and various longtime family friends — and spend the next seven or eight days all crammed together in a rental cabin or two on the lake.
Looking back, my first memory of being at Grand Lake is spotty yet curiously vivid. I remember sitting on the ribbed and rough concrete of a boat ramp, warm water up to the middle of my belly, gently lapping against my skin. Something happened to me there; I don’t recall what exactly but I was a little hurt maybe, and definitely upset. An adult came and took me out of the water and comforted me, and then an older kid relative showed me how to make a sandwich on a hot dog bun with cold cuts and cheese and crispy shoestring potatoes that came out of a paper can. I know this was at a resort called Long’s. Even through the haze, that sandwich stands out in stark relief, and I swear I can still feel the texture of the boat ramp on the backs of my legs, and when I close my eyes I can smell the water, with its notes of red dirt and marine gasoline and live fish and organic funk.
By the time I really remember it well, we had switched from Long’s to Pla-Port Resort, which I think was due to the old Okie men in our group believing it was a better spot for fishing. Pla-Port was built on the edge of the lake, over an outcropping of rock that dropped dramatically toward the waterline on one end of the property but maintained a rather steep cliff face on the other. While the Joneses — my grandparents’ BFFs since childhood — stayed in a large mobile home at the bottom of the hill, our people stayed in the resort’s biggest cabin up high, with its back room entirely made up of windows facing out over the water.
This cabin did not appear that big from the outside but somehow we managed to feed, sleep, bathe and entertain up to 20 people within its walls. There were three sets of bunk beds plus two double beds in that big back room, in addition to a dining table that must have been 12 feet or more long, with chairs pulled up all along both sides. The living room had two sofas that pulled out into beds and the one dedicated bedroom had I think two double beds and another bunk bed. There were also two smallish bathrooms with showers in them and a narrow galley kitchen right down the center of the house, through which one had to pass to get to any of the other rooms. Three window unit air conditioners throughout the cabin kept the place pretty frosty.
And there would be me and my brother and my grandparents, and then any or all of a long list of other kin, including my grandmother’s one brother and four other sisters, their kids, spouses and grandkids. The women — my grandmother and her sisters and sister-in-law Marilyn — would crowd one another in the tight kitchen, cooking huge breakfasts every morning and huge dinners every evening. Sometimes the adults would include us kids in games like Uno or Go Fish, but most evenings they drank Cuba Libres and Crown Royal & Cokes and played dominoes or card games like Shit on Your Neighbor and Montana Red Dog. They would cackle and bellow and roar with laughter long into the night — with us kids passed out completely just feet away.
In fact looking back that’s one of the most magical things about our lake vacations, and I didn’t have the understanding to appreciate it as a kid — I never slept anywhere in my life as soundly as I did in that cabin. I was running around having fun all day, I was far away from my mother and stepfather and the unpredictable environment that inevitably sprang up around them — and the big AC window units droned out a constant stream of white noise that allowed me to sink so deeply into the abyss that I could even fall and stay asleep during the rowdy late-night gatherings of the aging Okies.
In fact, the only time I ever remember being jostled from sleep at the lake was when the most intense electrical storm I have ever witnessed in my life raged outside those huge picture windows for hours one night in the early ’80s. I love a good storm but that one legitimately scared me shitless. The glass in the windowpanes rattled so hard I feared they would break. But the fury passed, and I returned to slumber, and in the morning I woke up to the smell of bacon and biscuits and coffee and all was right in the world again.
God, how I loved this vacation. I remember the longing, the desperation, the agonizing creep of days as I waited for its arrival each summer. It was like a second Christmas — better than Christmas! I could scarcely sleep the night before. And then we’d be sailing east on 166 in the leviathan pale yellow Oldsmobile, me and my brother in the back seat breathing secondhand smoke the whole way as we read the names of little towns on the signs passing outside the windows: Cedar Vale, Sedan, Peru, Niotaze, Caney, Tyro. A lot of times Uncle Kenny and Aunt Louise would be convoying with us, or Uncle Ted and Aunt Lucille, sometimes towing boats behind them on trailers. Regardless we always stopped at the Hardee’s in Coffeyville, which is where I fell in love with the Hot Ham & Cheese sandwich.
Then we’d plunge south into Oklahoma, putting Lenapah, Nowata, Vinita, Afton behind us and then crossing the gorgeous and rather legendary Sailboat Bridge. A jaunt through the quaint village of Grove, a turn down a bucolic side road, and then there we were. Stepping out of the car was an immersive experience, a jolt of humid heat in the face after so long in the cold, dry air of the over-air-conditioned car. The whole atmosphere seemed to be one with the lake. The smell of the water was dreamy, I could feel it in my clothes, taste it, hear it slapping and caressing the shoreline endlessly, even nature here dealing in its own brand of white noise.
Pla-Port Resort earned its name by offering many opportunities for play. While the old men spent their time trying to catch fish out on boats or in the cozy indoor fishing dock, with old movie theater seats lined up on all four sides of a large square hole in the floor, we kids had other ideas of fun. There was a floating dock that had a slide on it, as well as a tower with a boom extending out over the water, from which hung a steel triangle on a length of sturdy rope. We would spend hours taking turns swinging out in wide arcs over the lake, then letting go and making up our funniest dismounts, splashing over and over into the opaque Oklahoma water and cracking one another up.
Overlooking this swimming dock was a wide concrete patio with comfortable deck chairs, and in evenings when the weather cooled, the adults would often come down and watch us — me, Chris, various second cousins and other random kids — goofing around in the water while they drank cocktails. Directly behind this patio was the game room, which always had two or three fantastic old 1960s pinball machines, a pool table, pop machine, jukebox and I think maybe a ping-pong table. I remember there was a big tapestry on the wall depicting a trashcan locked with chains, and a clever raccoon picking the lock. We hung out in here a lot when it was really hot, some of the older kids monopolizing the jukebox while they shot game after game of nine-ball. I remember hearing “Fool to Cry” by the Stones on that box over and over one year.
Speaking of older kids, some of them got us all in trouble one summer when they figured out how to scam the pool table out of a free game by kicking the coin mechanism just right — and also how to scam the soda pop machine by popping the cap off a captive bottle inside the door and catching the soda that ran out in a cup. I knew these guys were doing it, and I even tried the pool table thing myself a couple times, I’ll admit, but I didn’t snitch.
As I got a little older, my grandparents started allowing me to bring along a friend each summer so that there would be someone my age, and I really appreciated that. As someone with no aunts or uncles or first cousins, there was generally a dearth of direct peers for me at family outings, so bringing a ringer was always a winning proposition. I didn’t have a lot of close friends, but the few that came along with me really made it special.
The fireworks stands were always open during our week at Grand Lake, too, and we were usually there on the Fourth of July, meaning we could totally go nuts shooting all manner of explosives out on the swimming dock while the adults watched from the patio. One time a bottle rocket went awry and shot straight toward the nearby fishing dock, where the resort’s owner, a crusty old fellow named Huber Logue, sat near the water on a chair, right adjacent to his Phillips 66 marine gas pump. That rocket flew straight under his ass and POP! reported loud and he jumped straight out of his skin.
One year Uncle Kenny took us out on a long pontoon boat ride south down the length of the lake. We passed a clearly very expensive new house right on the shore and someone said they heard it was Jana Jae‘s place and we all oohed and aahed at being so close to the home of such a famous person. We found a little secluded spot on the lake to moor the boat, and we got off and shot a bunch of fireworks there. It felt so lawless, yet the grown-ups around us either didn’t care that we were blowing shit up willy-nilly or they were actively egging us on as they downed another Coors. The freedom was intoxicating.
No trip to the lake was complete without making a pair of side quests: a visit to the insane indoor/outdoor museum Har-Ber Village, and a day spent on the Elk River in nearby Noel, Missouri.
Har-Ber Village was (and still is) a 50-acre complex covered with very old buildings, each of which is furnished in the style of a pioneer-era business or residence, with many contemporary artifacts on display. Other buildings on the property are packed to the gills with impressive collections of old things — 19th century carriages and wagons, dishes and crockery, barbed wire, clocks, etc. We would get our little brochure with the map and just meander through the place, usually on a day when it was about 98 degrees, and even though it was pretty much the same every year, I always looked forward to it, and never got tired of it.
I recall my great-grandfather John Wyant, himself born in 1898, accompanying us one year in the early 1980s, when he was just about getting to be too frail to walk the whole path through the village. I watched his face as he looked at these old familiar items, and he chuckled several times and remarked on things that he remembered well, and couldn’t believe were antique enough to be in such a museum. For a moment I saw him as an ideal exhibit to add to their collection — a real live Okie from the olden days before Oklahoma had even become a state.
Our trips to Har-Ber Village usually concluded with a visit to an old-timey 1890s-style ice cream parlor, which is where I fell in love with both rainbow sherbet (theirs was orange/lemon/lime) and waffle cones. Before that I had only had those terrible styrofoam-style ice cream cones and my first proper waffle cone experience was a revelation!
The museum was always a fun time but our excursions across the Missouri line to Noel never failed to be a highlight of our week. There was a kind of entertainment complex set up right on the edge of the Elk River, with early electro-mechanical video games and pinball machines inside, all kinds of cheap snack bar food, and pedal boats and canoes for rent outside. As a kid who grew up swimming in brown rivers, the crystal clear waters of the Elk astonished me. I could stand neck deep in it and see my feet just as easily as I could in a chlorinated swimming pool back home. And the water was cool, too, bracingly so, even on the most scorching days. We would swim and snack and have a great time — but before we left the town of Noel, we had one more stop to make.
These good ol’ boys had built a homemade go-kart oval track, and a bunch of homemade go-karts, too, and for a few bucks you could go absolutely apeshit out there. These weren’t the dreary little putt-putt cars that go three miles an hour around a tidy asphalt track at your nearby amusement park — these were psychotic and savage machines manifested by wild men, with no speed governors and precious little in the way of safety equipment. When you put your foot down in one of these things, you went right now. One year my friend Brad got a wasp down his shirt and ran off the road and crashed into a hay bale at a pretty good clip. I think he got stung more than once in that deal. Another time I was going around a corner when someone went out of control right behind me and rammed me hard enough that a badly-executed weld on the frame of my kart broke, and a piece of jagged steel shaved a big chunk of skin off my calf. The dudes who ran the park didn’t even have any band-aids on hand. I still have a scar from that one.
The last year I went to the lake with my family was the first year I had my own car — 1985. My buddy Alan came with. We were 16 then and getting into different stuff than when we were kids, and I hate to say it but I think we kind of got bored after a few days. We ended up doing the same thing there that we did back home in the evenings — drive up and down the main drags listening to the hits of the day on pop radio, talking shit and ogling any girls we happened to see. The next year I had a girlfriend and stayed behind at home when my grandmother went, and that was the end of the Grand Lake Era for me.
Exactly ten years later, in 1995, not long before my first marriage would collapse, I took my then-wife and her son, who was six, on a camping trip to Beaver Lake, Arkansas. The day we went it was 100+ degrees and horrifically humid. We tried to cool off in the lake but it was like swimming in hot soup. The poor kid got bit on the head by a massive asshole horsefly, too, which didn’t help. We sweltered in an airless tent all night and in the morning it was already decided that we would not sleep outdoors again on that trip. We spent the day visiting roadside attractions like the perpetually-comfortable Cosmic Cavern (where it’s always 64 degrees!) and the remarkable architectural triumph that is Quigley’s Castle, then I suggested we drive over into Oklahoma and see if we could find a cabin at Grand Lake to rent just for the night. It was agreed.
Driving into Grove as an adult I immediately recognized so many places, yet others had changed a lot. The town seemed to be growing, shedding some of its old charm as more national chain businesses moved in and homogenized the vibe. But I could still smell that lake and it called to me, so strong. I drove straight to Pla-Port and found old Huber still running the show. He and my grandmother had once gone on a cruise together after both had been widowed, just to have the company, and when I told him who I was, his face lit up and he asked how she was doing. We caught up a little bit and I asked if he happened to have a spot we could rent for the night. No luck, but he suggested another resort that he knew to have some vacancies at the time — Long’s.
We drove over there and forked over shockingly little money for a two-bedroom cabin with full kitchen and a deck overlooking the lake. The three of us ate, and swam in the lake, and stayed up after dark playing games. The night before had been a miserable bust, but now the three of us felt happy and sleepy and satisfied, and the whole trip was redeemed. We said our goodnights, crawled into our comfy beds in the exquisite cold of the cabin, and let the air conditioner sing us to sleep.
Even now, in my fondest dreams, I return to Grand Lake, the one place I felt most fully free to be my true self as a young person. I smell the water, I hear the waves, and I bask in the warmth of a safe and happy Oklahoma sunset.
