We Spent Years Looking for the Perfect Lake House—Did We Ever Really Need One?
By Carolyn Mackler
I was six weeks pregnant the first time my husband and I flirted with the idea of buying a lake house.
Jonas and I rented a car and drove from Manhattan to the Poconos to tour cabins with a retired commercial pilot who worked part-time as a realtor. He led us to a house that was built by the crooked man who walked a crooked mile. We ducked our heads as we entered the basement. Jonas tapped on the sloping walls while I crossed my arms, nodding knowingly. What did we know? We were barely thirty. The most expensive purchase we’d made was a couch with moss-green fabric that faded within a year. We were play-acting as grownups. On the drive to the next lake house, I told the realtor/pilot about my fear of flying.
“It’s no different than a bus,” he said. “Do you ride buses?”
“Sometimes,” I said. But a bus can pull over. On planes, there’s no escape hatch. Imagining this, the pregnancy nausea kicked in. My husband intuitively squeezed my hand.
The next lake house was a sad montage of grandparents and their live-in grandchildren. They could no longer afford the monthly payments. Out the window, the lake had receded past the point of no return.
“I don’t think the Poconos are for us,” I told Jonas over lasagna at a restaurant off the highway.
“I know,” Jonas said, sighing. He took it harder than I did. He wanted this to work right out of the gate.
I picked at a noodle. “Anyway, we should focus more on saving for the baby.”
Exit the Poconos lake house. Enter a baby boy and diapers, maintaining our relationship and careers while managing the creature wailing from the co-sleeper. When our son was two, we rented a cabin on a mountain lake in the Adirondacks. We skinny-dipped with our toddler in his Dora the Explorer swim ring and chatted by the firepit at night.
“The Adirondacks are perfect,” I told Jonas after the second day.
“I could see ourselves owning a camp here.”
By day four, the temperature plummeted. Hailstones the size of fists pounded the lake as we huddled inside, shivering under wool blankets.
“Maybe not the Adirondacks,” Jonas said. “Maybe the Catskills. I doubt they have snow in August.”
The next summer we purchased a used Honda and drove to a for-sale-by-owner shack in the Catskills. It was musty and dark. My eyes itched within seconds of stepping inside.
“How’s the lake?” I asked the owner.
“Feel free to take a swim,” he said. “No one uses the waterfront anymore.”
We fetched our bathing suits from the car. Our son pushed a plastic backhoe on the shore as Jonas and I waded in. While there’s a lot we don’t agree on—meat versus vegetarian, jazz versus no-jazz-ever—we both love open-water swims. This is our happy place.
But it also wasn’t the right summer for a lake house. I was ready for a second baby, which wasn’t coming as easily as the first. Also, who were we kidding? We didn’t have the money for this. And yet, the desire persisted. Jonas grew up on a dairy farm in Oklahoma. He spent summers picking pecans and corn at neighbors’ farms. Every August, he and his four siblings loaded into a pickup truck and got transported to their rich cousins’ lake house for a weekend of swimming, boating, and making s’mores. For a farm kid with raw hands and burned shoulders, it was an oasis.
Our second son arrived five years after our first, and this time we dove right back into the lake-house hunt. In New Hampshire Jonas almost got mutilated by a speedboat as he swam freestyle deep into Lake Winnipesaukee.
“Those damn motorboats!” he ranted when he came ashore. “They don’t watch for swimmers. I could have been killed!”
“You have two children now,” I yelled at him. “You can’t swim out like that in a motorboat lake.”
“If we had our own house,” he said, “it would be on a lake without motorboats.”
“If you die,” I shot back, “we’re never getting that lake house.”
My lake-house lust hasn’t been as defined as Jonas’s. I grew up spending summers with my family on the Finger Lakes in Central New York. When I was midway through college, my parents divorced. Soon after, my only sibling ex-communicated all of us. Those memories of cannonballing into Cayuga Lake and picking wild berries until our fingers were purple? Turns out it wasn’t what it looked like—no one was actually happy. From the moment I married my husband, from the moment I peed on that pregnancy stick, my focus has been on keeping us close. We have a family identity. We are a team. This protracted lake-house search was another part of the team effort.
We thought the lake house would make us a family but that was just the background scenery.
Our sons tell me that “you and Dad searching for a lake house” is a significant part of their childhood. There was a bungalow community in the Hudson Valley, Mount Desert Island in Maine. The November weekend we circled deserted communities off Route 17 in the southern Catskills. We stopped at a diner on the way home and our younger son ate beef chili, then puked all over his booster seat as his big brother pinched his nose in horror. One summer in Vermont we plodded through tangled woods to check out a rustic hut with an outhouse.
“Could we fix it up?” Jonas asked me.
“Are we really an outhouse family?” I wondered.
“How do outhouses even work?” the boys asked us, both fascinated and disgusted.
In summer 2019, Jonas got a call from a realtor about a cabin in the Berkshires: two bedrooms, a screened-in porch, a five-minute walk to a motorboat-free lake. We hopped in the Honda, sped up I-84, and finally, after more than fifteen years of searching, said yes. There was paperwork and a new septic to get installed but, by the end of that year, the four of us unlocked the door of our very own lake house.
For our first several visits, we referred to the previous owners by name—I wonder where Barbara keeps pans? How does Joel turn the fan on?—as if they were the real owners and this was just an AirBnb. In March 2020, as New York City became the Covid epicenter, we packed our now-aging Honda with the boys, a few totes, some rice and beans and oats. Our lake house was deep in the woods with no WiFi. We baked bread and drained our hotspots; we bickered, read, and played solitaire. By the summer we were swimming in the lake and grilling our dinner and doing the lake-house things that Jonas had always dreamed of.
That August, our dear friends drove up from the city. As I made a salad, Will sat across from me. “Is it going to be weird?” he asked. “To enjoy it as a lake house. Or will it always be where you spent Covid?”
“Huh,” I said, whipping the dressing. I had no clue. This was five months into the pandemic. I was trying to keep my kids sane. I didn’t have spare energy to contemplate.
We are now over three years into owning our lake house. The pandemic is winding down, and yet Will’s question proved prophetic. I walk from room to porch to room, remembering those nine months of sheltering-in-place, and I want to drive away and not look at the house in the rearview mirror. Jonas doesn’t agree. He chops wood in the yard and burns brush. Once a farm boy, always a farm boy. Our older son is on a gap year in Norway and wants to stay in Scandinavia for the summer. After that, he’s off to college. Our younger son has weekend baseball games, frisbee tournaments, and friends. He’ll go to the lake house but only if other kids are there. Jonas and I still love open-water swims together. Now that we’re middle-aged, I make us wear neon swim bubbles so we don’t get leg cramps and sink to the bottom of Cranberry Pond. With all the moving parts in our lives, we only get up there a few weeks in the summer, random weekends here and there.
“Maybe we should sell it,” I recently said to Jonas. I’ve also learned that along with the lockdown ghosts, I hate the constant packing and unpacking, schlepping groceries and coolers, being stuck on the West Side Highway on Friday afternoons, the Saw Mill on Sunday nights.
I thought Jonas would be devastated but he nodded, albeit sadly, and said, “That might make sense.”
But this wasn’t the way it was supposed to be—or maybe it was. Maybe this quest for a lake house wasn’t ever really about getting the lake house. Maybe it’s the story of two wannabe adults having babies, buckling sons into car seats, trying to decide if we’re an outhouse family, laughing together, skinny-dipping, kissing, eating, throwing up, fighting, making up. We thought the lake house would make us a family but that was just the background scenery. All along—and with no escape hatch—our family was making itself.
Carolyn Mackler is the acclaimed author of the YA novels The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things (A Michael L. Printz Honor Book), The Universe Is Expanding and So Am I, Infinite in Between, Tangled, The Future of Us, Vegan Virgin Valentine, Guyaholic, and Love and Other Four-Letter Words, and the middle grade novels Not If I Can Help It and Best Friend Next Door. Carolyn’s award-winning books have appeared on bestseller lists and been translated into more than twenty-five languages. Carolyn lives in New York City with her husband and two sons. Her first novel for adults, The Wife App, published in June 2023.