As a Kid in South Jersey -1960’s
I grew up on a small lake gouged out of an old and shallower cranberry bog. There was a whole string of these lakes in South Jersey, with earthen dams and small swamps and creeks between them . Every spring, each of the lakes would be let down so people could access the shoreline and clean up beaches or build and repair their docks. One lake at a time would be lowered for a week or two each spring.As the upper lake would drain, it would refill the lake below it. There were wooden and concrete boxes built out in the water above the culvert pipes under each dam. The water level was regulated by either adding a 2 X 6 board, to raise it, or removing one from to lower it. It was easy to do but no one except the President of each lake association was allowed to do it. I remember my dad being in charge the years I was growing up there on Mimosa Lake.
Even though we knew we would be expected to help with all the springtime chores involving lake clean up, all us kids always looked forward to the lake coming down. It meant it was time for muckwalking all around the perimeter, finding small treasures dropped from boats and rescuing stranded fish from shallow pools. It was fun and everything looked different from that perspective, down in the muck.
My family kept a whole bunch of 20 gallon tanks in the basement to put rescued fish in as temporary holding pens and as entertainment while the lake filled back up. We found pickerel, and sunnies mostly, but also newts and snakes and turtles. The lake was never drained totally dry but sometimes higher sections were left pretty exposed. One year in particular, the lake was held down for longer than usual and much lower too. The channel was clearly exposed. I think they must have been doing some major dam repairs that year, or maybe it was because of the severe lakeweed problem the year before. Some people did not seem to understand that you should not fertilize grass right down to the waters edge because it ran off into the lake and caused severe over growth of what we called seaweed. It was so bad one year that I nearly drowned when I swam the length of the lake and got tangled in the long strands.
Originally, we kids all walked in the muck barefoot but after one kid got bit by a snapping turtle buried in the muck and several of us cut our feet on glass, we graduated to old sneakers. Sometime the mud was so sucky that it would pull our shoes off as we tried to extricate ourselves from the deeper spots.I am sure our mothers made us take our stinky clothes off outside before coming in to take a bath. There is nothing quite like the smell of lake muck and it took more than a few baths to wear off.
Some parents made use of their kids liking to explore in the muck. My dad would send us down with buckets to fill with heavy, goopy muck to use as fertilizer for his lawn. He had one of the thickest, greenest lawns around, with a thick, muck, topsoil layer above the white sand for the grass to grow in. He also ran plastic pipes down to a water pump in the cove below our house and irrigated the whole lawn with rich lake water. We had all these switches on the kitchen wall where he could turn on each zone as needed. During fire season, when the Pine Barrens were burning, he would aim a few at the roof to keep flying embers from catching the roof on fire.
One year we found a pure white clay bank exposed along the lake edge and we made pinch pots from it, firing them in a bonfire. We found bicycles, boats, fishing rods and lures, and once, the remains of a neighbors missing dog who had disappeared that winter when the ice was too thin to walk on. There was a reward for finding poor Max and Robert got a new bicycle for bringing him home. There were lots of turtles, both King and Snapper hiding in the muck. The turtles were always bad about eating the baby ducks so each spring we rounded up the mothers and ducklings and kept them in protective pens until they got bigger. There were quite a few kids living on each lake and we would wander in groups to muck-walk, traveling from lake to lake as the water levels changed. It would have been too dangerous to go alone as some of the mud was like quicksand and you needed help getting out of it. If you were gone all day and not bothering your parents you could get out of some boring chores, so we were pretty darn good at staying gone. We all had to be back home shortly after the 6 pm fire whistle though, or we could end up grounded the next day.
I have fond memories of exploring all the nooks and crannies of the shorelines with the other kids. Sometimes I still enjoy squishing mud between my toes, but I am a lot more careful of putting my feet where I can’t see the bottom these days. I was braver back then.
-Edgewise Wendy
