Once More to the Lake – Review
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The writer and his son are alike due the similar experiences they both have a young children as they visit an amazing lake in Maine that is often visited by the writer and his son and well as the writer and his dads when he was younger. They are different because even though they are both coming up to the lake as kids, because they live at different times in history which in turn has a different impact on them. The writer reveals himself to be a “salt-water man” who decides to bring his son to the lake because he was someone “who had never had any fresh water up his nose and who had seen lily pads only from train windows.” When the writer says, “I seemed to be living a dual existence” he means he lived these trips to the lake as a kid but now when he comes back as an adult with his son it seems as though he is father while still wanting to be the kid like he used to be.
The writer’s conflicting feelings are a result of his aging self. The experiences he enjoyed through a narrow-minded young child are now seen again by an older self who is more wise and mature. His classic fishing trips he took with his father are now an outdated event that has been overtaken by motors. The writer is in denial of the ever-changing lake which causes him to feel lost in his own memories.
White is disconcerted to find only two tracks in the dusty road where three had once been because it jars his illusionary sense of the pasts being preserved in this special place, his momentary peace in feeling “[t]here had been no years.” The absence of the third track reminds him of the reality that years have passed and will continue to pass. His son will grow up, just as he grew up.
Sound “breaks the illusion” because it reminds the writer that time has not stopped at any moment. The writer says, “The only thing that was wrong now, really, was the sound of the place, an unfamiliar nervous sound of the outboard motors.” New inventions as well as new cultures develop to change society as it ages. The same will occur to his son as to him: continuous aging and changing.
White is referring to his son in the last sentence of the essay. White is imagining himself within his son and how his son was feeling at that moment.