Crump Lake Vacation Memories
Crump Lake vacation memories. All photos and stories welcomed.
So many good memories, such happening times.
I guess my most golden memory of Lake Crump was when I was a young boy. Auntie Meme had this old noble cabin there. Uncle Meme was seldom home, a traveling man. I would spend the weekend there once a summer. The place always seemed so magical. I would play in the woods pretending I was a Crumpatako Indian. I found a vivid blue spear head in a creek in the woods there. It had sparkling red veins. I still have it in a box somewhere. And those sweet water radishes. I would come the beaches picking them off the water vine. The water is so clean here you don't need to wash the radishes. They are crunching and sweet. A strange vapor taste that lingers like a intimate whisper. I never saw the Lake Crump Monster. But I had fun boating and fishing, swimming there. The woods are thick I got lost once and it was getting towards evening. I couldn't find my way back to the lake. I heard a deep growl, like a bear or mountain lion in the trees as evenings shadows fell. I walked faster. Then I came to this tent and the strong smell of burning marijuana. A old hippie was camping here. I told him I was lost and he led me back to the shore. All I had to do was follow the shore home. What a great feeling it was, picking a few more radishes for late night snack and going to bed on the top bunk of the guest bed room. Sleep hitting quick from a long days adventure. Ah those where the days....
Gathered around the warm fire in the middle of September, turning leaves turning, just watching the calm lake surface from afar, wondering if anyone'll catch a glimpse of the old Devil Fish. Someone passes a bottle of wine around and we all starts telling ghost stories-- the old lodge, the whispering boxes, the creeper, the tree hollerer ("just some Injun windchimes," the doctor insists). Another bottle, and there's some question as to whether the Crumps named themselves for the lake and the tribe, or if they married in for headrights, or if they just happened to have the right name for the place; the point is unsettled by the end of the third bottle, and interest has moved on to ghost stories again. The baying wolf that Barney Thromwell killed, the bloody prints at Broken Rock, the haunting of the old Lucas Borgia claim, the shore where the lake-man come, the Devil's Chasm, the Dead Man's Wagon, the Evergreen Woman.
Oh I remember when we went water skiing with Otto and Chris Titan a few summers ago. We had such a great time.
Blue Hand Lux
Every time Dad and I went to Crump Lake, Mom would stay home and search my room, confiscating every issue of FAR OUT WIZARD POWER that I had managed to squirrel away in ever more ingenious hiding places.