Lake-A-Way

There isn’t much left of Lake-A-Way anymore. If you drove out there today, you might have a hard time imagining what the place once was. The old swimming area where I spent so many summer afternoons is gone. Gone are the pier, the lounging platform, the springboard, and the little sandy beach. The water is gone, too. In its place is an overgrown crater of mud and weeds, with a few scattered pools of water that now seem to belong mostly to the ducks and egrets. It is a strange thing to look at a place that was once so familiar and find that almost nothing about it is still recognizable.

For me, Lake-A-Way was never just a lake. It was an integral and formative part of my boyhood in Big Level, a place woven into some of my happiest memories. I learned to swim there. I spent countless summer afternoons there with friends and cousins. I camped there, worked there, rode my motorcycle there, and spent some of my first teenage years trying to figure out girls there. Later, my wife and I and our daughters spent some wonderful times there. My mother eventually made our little family lot there into a home, and for a time it became the place where we gathered for holidays and where my aging grandparents spent their final years.

Most of those memories have softened with time and are wrapped in a soft haze that seems to settle over the happiest parts of my childhood. Some details have grown blurry around the edges, but the memories themselves remain warm and bright. And yet there was a time when Lake-A-Way was brand new.

I was eleven years old in the spring of 1965 when Daddy took our whole family over to see the lake while it was still under construction. It was only three miles from our house, but I had no idea that it existed or even that anything was going on over there across the highway from Griffin’s country store. The dam and spillway were already in place, and water from Kirby Creek was slowly filling the new lake. I marveled at the size of the swimming area, with its pier and little sandy beach. To an eleven-year-old boy, it looked like paradise. I imagined the fun it would be to occasionally get to go swimming there.

Then Daddy blew my little 11-year-old mind when he announced that he had bought one of the lots. He explained that owning the property, whether we ever built anything on it or not, would give us perpetual membership and privileges to all the facilities and parts of the development. He said that buying the lot would be much cheaper in the long run than paying an annual membership for the whole family. It got even better when he told us that Uncle ’Nell had bought the adjacent lot. It all seemed too good to be true.

I don't know how much Daddy invested in the lot—probably no more than a few hundred dollars—but even at the time, I thought it was uncharacteristic of him to commit to such an extravagance. Money was always tight around our house during those days and Daddy was not normally a man who spent money on things we didn't need. But I never questioned it.

A 1965 advertisement in the Stone County Enterprise for the new lake development in Big Level.

Before long, the lake had completely filled and the weather was warm enough for swimming. There soon would be a springboard on the edge of the dam and a lounging platform out in the deepest part of the swimming area. The bathhouse was almost complete, and work on a nearby boat dock would be built the next year.

It was early that first summer that Daddy taught me how to swim properly. He did it by pulling me off the pier into water just over my head. He then showed me how easy it was to do the crawl stroke. Even though the water wasn’t much more than five feet deep there, I was able to keep my head above water and managed to make my way back to the ladder without dog paddling. Before the day was over, I was diving in headfirst and swimming with something resembling a proper technique.

It wasn’t long before my brother Keith and I and my cousins were racing out to the lounging platform and back. The fact that the water was twelve or thirteen feet deep out in the deepest section was of no concern to me. I was now a master swimmer. As proof of that fact, I earned my Boy Scout “one-mile swim” patch the following year.

That’s me climbing up the ladder to join my older brother and cousins. This grainy image is a still captured from one of my family’s old home movies. Yes, I could’ve used AI to clean it up a bit, but this way it perfectly fits with the soft haze that’s settled over my happy memories of that time.

There are so many other things I remember about those years at Lake-A-Way. There were the family cookouts and picnics on the Lott lots. Keith and I and our cousins Mike and Jerry would pitch our tents and camp out overnight. There were the lazy, carefree afternoons of my early teenage years when I would go swimming and hang out with friends while somebody's portable radio blasted the latest hits across the water. And there were the two Debbies who came out almost every Sunday afternoon. I distinctly remember their yellow and white bikinis.

Lake-A-Way was also where I had my first real show-up-every-morning job. It was early summer in 1968, just after I finished the ninth grade. Lec Hatten, the lake manager, hired Danny Rayburn and me to do maintenance work around the lake and village. Danny was a classmate of mine, both at Home School and Stone High. We'd been friends since the first grade.

We cut bushes and disposed of fallen limbs. We did some cleaning behind the dam with sling blades and axes. But the job that took the longest was also the most pleasurable. Mr. Hatten tasked us with an aluminum boat and sent us around the perimeter of the lake to spray poison on the lily pads that were beginning to take over, particularly on the back side and far end of the lake. It took us a couple of weeks to work our way around that thirty-acre body of water.

There's no telling how much of those chemicals we ingested, or what effect they had—or may still be having—on us. At the time, of course, we didn't give it a thought. It was just a fun summer job. And I always finished each day's work with a quick swim before hopping on my motorcycle and drying off on the ride home.

Speaking of that summer and motorcycles, I had gotten my first bike a few months earlier, at Christmas. It was a Honda 65, and having turned fourteen, I was old enough—and had enough freedom—to come and go pretty much as I pleased after my chores were done. I would often ride by the lake just to see who was there. Sometimes I'd join them for a swim.

One day, during the latter part of that summer, I swung by late in the morning. I knew it was probably too early for any of my friends to be there, but it was hot and I thought I might just go for a solo swim to cool off. As I pulled up, I saw that one family was already there—a woman, a teenaged girl and two younger children. They weren't lake regulars, and I didn't recognize them from a distance.

I was about to ride off when the teenaged girl smiled, waved at me and said, “Hey, Russell.”

That caught me completely off guard. The voice was familiar, but with her wet hair and only her head sticking out of the water, it took me a couple of beats before I recognized her. It was Sharon, my girlfriend from Home School. She was there with her mother, whom I'd never met, and her younger sister and brother. Since I was already wearing my cutoffs, it only took a moment before I had plunged into those welcoming waters.

Sharon was a year behind me in school. The previous May I had graduated from the eighth grade and moved on to Stone High. As I wrote in my “Solitary Man” essay, I had worried that she and I wouldn't survive being apart the whole year before she, too, moved up to high school. Even though we'd exchanged a few letters during that gap school year and the two long summers that bookended it, our paths had not crossed. I needn't have worried. What followed that day was a delightful few hours of swimming, flirting and getting reacquainted. Her mother even invited me to join them for their picnic lunch of hotdogs, chips and cookies. I was thrilled to accept.

Sharon and I eventually broke up a few years later, during my final year at Stone High, and I moved on to junior college at Perk. Within a few weeks, I met a freshman girl from George County who would become my true love and life's partner.

Gena and I soon became engaged that year and married in the middle of our sophomore year. Living in Wiggins until school was out, and before moving away to Delta State University, she and I also enjoyed many happy hours swimming at the lake whenever we could.

We attended several fish fry and barbecue cookouts there with my large extended family. On one memorable occasion, when Gena’s younger sisters came for a weekend visit, we took them to the lake for a day of swimming and picnicking.

By then, of course, Lake-A-Way was no longer just the place where I had grown up. It had become part of our family story.

But life rolled on, as it always does, and those carefree days became fewer and farther between.

In the late 1970s, circumstances took several unexpected turns. Mama sold our family farm to my brother, John, who had recently married. She was working at Southeastern Baptist College in Laurel by then and living in a house on campus, but she wanted a place to come “home” to on weekends and holidays. It wasn't long before she bought a double-wide manufactured home and installed it on that little Lake-A-Way lot.

Mama had another reason for wanting a home there. By the early 1980s, it was becoming increasingly difficult for her parents—my Bond grandparents—to live unassisted and keep up their house and farm down in the southeastern part of the county. Mama was already thinking about their long-term care. She and her siblings worked out a plan to move my grandparents up to Big Level, to Mama's Lake-A-Way home. An elder-care worker would stay with them during the weekdays, and Mama would stay with them on weekends.

And so, that little lake house took on another role. The place where I had spent so many wonderful times as a boy became the place where my grandparents spent the last years of their lives.

After their deaths a few years later, Mama continued to spend most of her weekends there. Gena and I and our daughters enjoyed many visits with her, including several Thanksgivings and Christmases, at that tiny lake house.

With all of those changes, my relationship with the lake had also changed, as it had for all of us. Upon her remarriage and move to Oregon in 2000, Mama sold the house and lot. With that, our family's story with Lake-A-Way came to an end. Or at least our physical connection to it did. The lake itself had already begun its long decline. The old swimming area had closed many years earlier, and the once-vibrant retirement and recreation village had fallen on hard times.

Then, in the spring of 2021, the dam was found to be leaking near the spillway. The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality inspected it and determined that the lake would have to be drained and the dam rebuilt before it could be refilled. The MDEQ conducted a controlled drain, releasing the lake's water back into Kirby Creek without causing damage downstream. Then they broke the dam completely at the creek bed to allow the water to flow freely into the creek.

The photo on the left from the Stone County Enterprise shows the lake immediately after it was drained in 2021. The photo on the right, taken this week by my brother John from a similar angle but a bit further back, stands in stark contrast, as a testament to how quickly nature will reclaim land that’s left untouched. There’s a sad irony in the sign that remains on the pine tree in the foreground. There’s even more irony, and much sadder still, in the name: “Lake-A-Way.”

It's possible that the dam will someday be rebuilt, but it doesn't look like that will happen anytime soon. In the meantime, what was once a beautiful little lake surrounded by a thriving retirement and recreation village has become an overgrown crater of mud and vegetation, with a few remaining pools of water occupied only by the occasional ducks and egrets.

I have more than a tinge of sadness when I think about it. Not simply because the lake is gone. I suppose what bothers me most is the thought that in another generation or two there may be little evidence that there was ever a recreational lake there in Big Level. And there won’t be anyone left with a living memory of all the good times that were had there. That is the part that gets to me the most.

Places come and go. I know that. Lakes disappear. Dams fail. Buildings are torn down. Woods grow back. That's what time does. But there is something particularly poignant about watching a place disappear that once seemed so permanent to a boy who had no reason to imagine that the world he knew would ever change.

When I was eleven, Lake-A-Way seemed to have suddenly appeared, right there in our backyard, just for us. It was sparkling new and full of possibilities. Daddy bought us a little piece of it, as did Uncle ’Nell. So did Uncle Percy. There were summers ahead, chock full of picnics and cookouts, nights in tents with my cousins, portable radios playing the latest hits, motorcycles and girlfriends and countless afternoons in the water. I didn't know then that I was living in what would someday become memories. I don’t guess any of us ever do. Maybe that's why those memories have become so precious.

The lake, with water that once seemed so vast to an eleven-year-old boy, is now gone. But even so, after all these years, I can still see the sunlight sparkling and shimmering on the gentle ripples. I can still see my friends and cousins jumping from the pier. I can still feel that first plunge into the cool water. I can still hear the music drifting from somebody's portable radio and someone calling my name. And somewhere in those remembered lazy summer days, I am still eleven years old. Lake-A-Way may have gone away. But, for now, it is still very much with me.

WORDs TO PONDER

“You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time—back home to the escapes of Time...”
Thomas Wolfe in “You Can’t Go Home Again”

SONG OF THE DAY

“Hot Fun In The Summertime” by Sly and the Family Stone (Greatest Hits, 1969)

Bonus Track

“Indian Lake” by The Cowsills (Captain Sad and His Ship of Fools, 1968)