The Lake Cabin

Just over 50 years ago, my parents leased a lot on the shores of Possum Kingdom Lake, a reservoir on the Brazos River located primarily in Palo Pinto County Texas. The lake, a project of the Brazos River Authority and the Works Progress Administration dating from the 1930s and early 40s, has an area of approximately 17,000 acres with 310 miles of shoreline and holds 750,000 acre feet of water. Sometimes.

At first, if you wanted to spend the night on the property you slept in a home-made pop-up camper that we hauled all over the western United States during my high school years. About 1965 or so, Mom and Pops purchased a surplus one-room railroad section-hand cabin and moved it onto the lot as the nucleus of what has become a multi-room, multi-bath, multi-bed cabin with a wrap-around porch that looks out over the water. Sometimes.

I say sometimes, because the cabin is actually on Veal Creek, just about a half-mile from where it joins up with the Brazos River and the lake proper.  Since this is Texas, in times of drought the creek drys up early and shrinks to a narrow channel, or disappears altogether. During those times, the nearest water can only be seen a half-mile or more to the East. In times of prolonged drought, there is no water to be seen at all.

The water always comes back eventually, and the presence or absence of water out front is not what draws us to the Cabin. It became the gathering place for the family. We gathered there for Christmas, and Labor Day, 50th Anniversaries, and all points in time between.

In the summer, we sat under swamp-cooler air conditioners (or went and jumped in the water) and in the winters we gathered around the wood-burning Franklin stove, shivering until someone discovered that it was a lot colder in the cabin than it was outdoors.

We came as youngsters, and we brought our babies. We come now as Seniors and bring our grandchildren. Recently, my grandson asked me how long I had been coming to the lake and I answered, "All my life." That's not quite true, but I was able to state truthfully that his father had been coming all his life. Here we are in the summer of 1967.

And here are his children in the summer of 2015, nearly 50 years later, in almost the exact same spot.

We came with our friends, and we came from our studies.

In the late summer of 2011, we thought we had lost the cabin. In fact, one report included it in the more than 200 homes and properties destroyed by a series of wildfires in the region. And the fire did come right up to the cabin itself; that dock in the background of the 1967 picture above burned, as did some other outlying structures, but thanks to the efforts of volunteer firemen, the cabin itself was untouched.

It's been more than a decade since Mom and Pops passed on. My sister and her family now make it possible to continue the traditions of gathering at the Lake. Lord willing - and it's a certainty that the creek is not going to rise - we will gather at the Lake Cabin again this Labor Day. And as a bonus, this time there will be water.