In the mid-1970s, my parents bought a small, rundown cottage on Fourth Lake, somewhere between Old Forge and Eagle Bay. It was a single-level clapboard building with a century’s worth of furniture down a mile of dirt drive from the main road. We had two neighbors but neither was visible from the cottage. Surrounded by a dense pine forest that grew right to the lake’s edge, the place was secluded.
It was a four-hour drive from our house in Fowlerville to the cottage, where we would go to clean the place between renters. Sometimes we’d stay three or four days at a time. At that age, around eight years old, nothing could keep me out of the lake, not even its freezing May temperatures. I was in the habit of bolting out of bed in the morning and running
