In 1981, Karen Mosteller and I were inseparable. At the age of 11, I moved from California to Missouri. We were in a new neighborhood, and I didn’t know anyone. When Karen’s family moved in three houses down, I was ecstatic. Finally, a girl my age was living just down the street from me! We became fast friends, mainly because we had so many common interests: Bon Jovi, Chinese jump rope, roller skating, and making up stories. In fact, we used to make up whole new worlds and write stories in her room, using her mother’s old and decrepit childhood dollhouse to act out the stories. Our friendship meant the world to me, mainly because Karen taught me how to be adventurous and imaginative. Karen lived right on a small lake, considered common property in the subdivision we both lived in. One day, we decided we should move our storytelling to the great outdoors.
It was a hot summer day for St. Louis, probably around 95 degrees. Karen and I had been working on a story about a mystical land. We decided that the next morning we should wake up at sunrise, take her brother’s canoe out on to the lake and use the mist and eeriness of the scene as inspiration to write the next chapter. The next morning we woke up very early; I had slept at her house that night and we stayed up for a long time, making fried bologna sandwiches in her mother’s immaculately clean kitchen. (Mrs. Mosteller was very strict and insanely clean.) We stumbled outside and the setting was perfect. Low lying fog was rolling on the surface of the water; the sun was just peering over the horizon, casting pink, orange, and purple hues on the cumulus clouds in the early morning sky. We dragged Kevin’s aluminum canoe to the shoreline, admiring it’s chipped and peeling red paint and the words “Old Town” painted in black on the side of the bow. It slid gracefully into the water and we each hopped in. Karen was in the back, and I was in the front. We paddled silently out to the center of the lake and talked excitedly about our mystical story ideas. After a few hours, we rowed excitedly back towards the shore. Suddenly, Karen was rowing at a different tempo than me; I struggled to get the canoe back in rhythm. Before we knew it, the canoe leaned far to the left and tipped over into the chilly lake.
I came up to the surface, gasping for air and choking on the disgusting lake water. Our notebooks, sweaters, and shoes floated all over the place. In the confusion, the one sane thought I had was that the lake seemed oddly deep. Karen screamed my name, and frantically tried to gather our things and push the canoe upright again. Karen said something about snapping turtles at the bottom of the lake and that got me screaming louder than her. Then, it occurred to me there were all kinds of nasty microscopic things living in the water, ready to infect us. I shouted to Karen to spit. Thinking I said “swim,” Karen’s arms and legs went flailing in four different directions. I kept shouting “Spit!” and dog paddled frantically towards the shore, all the while spitting and coughing up lake water, paranoid I had ingested some kind of fatal water parasite determined to destroy my liver and send me to my maker. Finally, after what seemed like hours (but probably was about sixty seconds), my feet felt the bottom of the lake and we had made it to the shore. We scrambled up the grass hill and ran to her basement door, through the computer room, up the stairs, and into her mom’s immaculately clean kitchen. We dove into the drawers and pulled out all the kitchen towels, licking them and wiping our tongues in an attempt to get rid of the offending invisible lake parasites. We spat into the kitchen sink and grabbed plastic Flintstones glasses, overflowing them with 7UP. (7UP, of course, was known to be a fantastic lake parasite killer.) After spitting our mouths dry, we sank ungracefully down to Mrs. Mosteller’s pea-green tile floor, so clean you could eat off it. We were exhausted, but hysterically laughing and crying at the same time. Several minutes later, her mom walked in and screamed at us for about thirty-five minutes about how we had ruined her nice, clean kitchen. That night, I slept over again and we nearly split our stomachs from laughing at the day’s events. Although Karen moved away about a year later and we lost touch, I’ll never forget her friendship and the lessons our time together taught me about being adventurous and imaginative. Swimming in a lake, however, well…. 