LAKESIDE: THE ENDURANCE

Let's begin at the end shall we?

You see, I could tell you more stories about that little house on the lake than have been written in all the books in the world. The walls of that cottage half-way between apparent nowheres have witnessed passion, loneliness, love, separation, espionage (that one's a juicy one) and murder. You see, I know because they know, because they told me, little bits and pieces at a time. After fifty years with the amazing storytellers that are thin walls and air vents, the stories sort of pile up, boring ones, stupid ones, weird ones, ones they probably shouldn't have let the walls or vents know. I guess old men must clear a little mental space before they die, it'll probably help me sleep a little better.

This is definitely not what I should be telling you about, right, the cottage. My father was a carpenter, one of those rugged army types you see. He went to Venice once, during the war, when he came back I was ten, a little sketch of a cottage in his hand and a dark green bag on his back. He told me stories of that little cottage. Of the little cottage that was left after all the buildings around it were swallowed by the sea under the crippling weight of mighty battle. He told me how he admired that little solitary structure, how he spent as many days as he could before he was shipped back on a bed, staring at it, in pain, making a sketch of it. He signed it Endurance, the same name he called the little cottage he spent the final six years of his life building, the gift he left my mother and I a month after my seventeenth birthday. You see, the Italians left a bullet sat right next to his spine before he had to go back home, the doctors couldn't touch that sucker. He killed a shitload of those Italians but they got him good too, he just didn't know it yet.

You see, my mother was a smart lady, a very smart lady indeed. She knew we couldn't live in it, God no! She knew what people said about it while they watched the sickly war hero build it. She knew it was an oddity, a novelty, with no other way to make money and tuition fees to pay; it was a fairly straight line between a floating cottage and money. After two world wars, people in the fifties and sixties couldn't take any more of this serious shit; they wanted to be happy, to travel, to see new and exciting things, you know; campy shit. That's why when she turned it into a getaway spot a dozen people stepped up to spend two nights in my mother's oddity. Over the years till she too fell gravely ill and died she managed to build a steady income for herself and build me a way to earn a living, to her error, she assumed passively after all she did to get me a good education. Living up to expectations hasn't ever been my style anyway. I joined the 'family business'.

I've been part of the family business till its demise when the endurance lodge itself was swallowed by the crystal waters of the beautiful lake Catherine. It's remained afloat the last few years on equal parts faith, denial and patch work. It wasn't pulling as many get away lovers anyway and it was costing me almost as much to repair as I was making off of it.

I handed over the deed to the land surrounding the Endurance to the kind people that paid me a fair half of what the land was really worth give or take a life-long retirement home with more anachronistic geezers just like my sorry ass, some of them are crazy, so not exactly like me, but we all look alike to these young people. The endurance i suppose is now probably the name of some million dollar resort half-way into completion. I don't know, i haven't been there since they took the original under.

Now that you know my whole life story, fuck I wasted my life, we can get to the fun stuff.