Once More to...E. B. White

When I was in high school, I read a renowned E. B. White essay called "Once More to the Lake." In the essay, White recounts the experience of bringing his young son to the lake in Maine where he himself had spent summers as a youth. He is at first fearful that he is putting his own childhood memories at risk, but those fears prove groundless. Despite some changes (the missing third rut in the road, the sound of whining outboards as opposed to throaty inboards, the absence of Beeman's Gum), the pair succeed in recapturing much of the fabled past. At the end of the essay, seeing his son in the role that had been his, White feels the chill of his own mortality.

The essay appealed to me because it evoked one of my own favorite childhood memories. When I was five, my parents and grandparents rented a cottage on the Child's River in Falmouth, Cape Cod. Each morning, my father and grandfather would awaken me with a rendition of the Choc-full-o-nuts coffee jingle. We three menfolk would bolt down fried eggs, bacon, beans, and brown bread, and head out fishing.

We had a rented 16 foot plywood skiff with a seven horsepower Elgin outboard. I sat in the middle, my grandfather at the bow; my father, the male in his prime, sat in the stern and ran the boat. We'd catch scup, blowfish, sea robins, and flounder. Frequently, one of the adults would ask me to hold his line, and (instantly!) there'd be a fish on. I didn't figure out their largesse for years.

Some twenty-eight years later, I had a five year old son of my own. I'd never forgotten White's essay, and I decided to emulate his experience. I made a few phone calls, rounded up my son and my dad, and at dawn one summer morning we were eating fried eggs, bacon, beans, and brown bread in a breakfast joint in Waquoit. A few minutes later, we were cruising down the Child's River in a borrowed Boston Whaler with a forty horsepower Johnson outboard (an upgrade!). My son sat in the middle seat, my father at the bow, while I ran the boat from the rear bench seat.

We anchored in the same spot. We caught the descendants of the same fish. We even fooled my son into thinking he had caught them all(he was much more gracious about it than I had been). The feeling was all there.

I had forgotten all about E. B. White's epiphany, but suddenly, it was all too clear. My grandfather had sat in the bow; he had since died. I was sitting where my father had sat almost three decades earlier. If I were ever to make this trip again, I would be sitting in the bow. After the bow, you lose your seat.