{"product_id":"the-lake-the-river-the-other-lake-isbn-9781400079940","title":"The Lake, the River \u0026 the Other Lake","description":"The resort town of Weneshkeen, nestled along Michigan’s Gold Coast, has become a complex melting pot: townies and old timers mix with ritzy summer folk, migrant cherry pickers, wily river guides, and a few Ojibwe Indians. As the summer blooms, these lives mingle in surprising ways–a lifelong resident and Vietnam Vet pursues the take-no-guff deputy sheriff, while plotting revenge against the jet-skiers polluting his beloved lake; a summer kid from downstate stumbles into a romance with the sexiest rich girl in town; the town’s retired reverend discovers the Internet and a new friend in his computer tutor. A resonant social comedy with richly-drawn characters and quirky charm, \u003ci\u003eThe Lake, the River \u0026amp; the Other Lake \u003c\/i\u003ewelcomes you into a world that you may never want to leave.“A wonderful novel. . . . Very moving and very funny.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A comic novel with a dark and thoughtful edge, which is the mark of all good comedy. There is enough absurdity and energetic plotting here, enough incongruity and haplessness to keep the laughs coming.” —\u003ci\u003eChicago Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Amick displays myriad gifts throughout, creating a believable, heartfelt fictional world and ambitiously introducing a symphonic arrangement of stories. . . . It’s a summer well spent in Amick’s amiable company.” —\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The last writer to celebrate the charms of rural Michigan with equal panache was probably Ernest Hemingway.” —\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003eSteve Amick’s short fiction has appeared in \u003ci\u003eMcSweeney’s\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Southern Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe New England Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003ePlayboy\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eStory\u003c\/i\u003e, the anthology\u003ci\u003e The Sound of Writing\u003c\/i\u003e, and on National Public Radio. He has an MFA from George Mason University and has been a college instructor, playwright, copywriter, songwriter, and musician. He lives in Michigan, dividing his time between his hometown, Ann Arbor, and a family cottage on a famously clear lake along the northern edge of the Lower Peninsula.1.\u003cbr\u003eThere was a heavenly time, a sliver-thin window of peace that Roger Drinkwater cherished every year on Meenigeesis--those early days when  the water warmed just enough for him to bear but all others steered  clear and he could swim in peace and hear nothing but the water and  his breath and the birds and the distant road: the way it had once  been on this lake. It was a time before jet-skis; before the idiot  boys on their idiot toys, as he thought of them in the little  singsong chant that drummed in his head the rest of each summer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne misty predawn in late May, he got his first indication that the  lake was now warm enough for at least a few intrepid others. Kids, of  course, tended to brave the waters sooner than their finicky parents,  and the evidence he found was something that obviously came from a  child. It was floating, half-submerged, at the end of his dock, and  he bumped his head against it on the return lap of his morning swim:  an underwater toy in the shape of a flattened megaphone, purple  plastic with a green mouthpiece. If it hadn't had a brand name,  Sub-Speaker, stamped on the side, he might not have known what it was  for.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe stood there in the water, examining it, disgusted. Plastic toys  lost in the lake were essentially just pollution. Still, he wondered  how well it worked. Glancing around first to make sure he was alone,  he knelt to the waterline and put the mouthpiece to his lips. What  came out was Chief Joseph One-Song's famous words to Congress:  \"Nimaanaadendam gaa zhi binaadkamgiziik . . .\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe water was so still, the sound waves would carry as if across a  drumhead. It's funnier, he decided, if no one can see me, and so he  dropped lower in the water, the toy just nosing above the waterline,  and he repeated the phrase, making it more guttural and ominous and  spooky. He imagined some dumb cluck on the other side, those rich  weekend warriors with the matching hot pink jet-skis and that pontoon  boat, looking out and shuddering, unable to spot him, unable to  understand the words, just knowing that the words were ancient,  foreboding, and they would feel very, very uneasy. It was hard to do  it without snickering.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eroger drinkwater was actually only seven-eighths Indian (Ojibwe or  Chippewa--or Anishinaabe, if you wanted to get precious about it,  which he never did--of the Ojaanimiziibii band). The little bit left  over was actually Polish, his mom's mom having come up as a young  girl from Hamtramck, outside Detroit, back in the twenties. She  thought she would be spending just the one summer--out at Cliffhead,  the place people now called \"the bootlegger's\"--working as a nanny  for the Fifels, the family of the man known at the time as the  Rumbleseat King. She once told Roger she thought that at most she  might learn to swim that summer. But much more than that happened.  She got involved with Roger's grandfather, John Birchtree, a  leather-dark Indian boy who helped out in the Fifels' stables, and  she got in trouble and knew she could never go back home and so they  got married, both of them still teenagers. Even if she hadn't gotten  in trouble, it would have been damaging enough just to have been  briefly mixed up with an Indian boy: there were other Hamtramck girls  in the household staff and they would return with the Fifels,  bringing sordid stories of the summer, and she would be ruined back  home. Beyond ruined, she might be in actual danger there.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo, though she never returned and never spoke to her family again,  his Grandma Oshka carried on the only traditions she knew, filling  the many children and grandchildren that followed with golabki and  pierogi and tales of Smok Wawelski, the dragon from the Wawel Castle  in Krakow, and how a poor shoemaker killed the evil dragon with  trickery and a river.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut seven-eighths was still pretty damn pure in 2001 and it was good  enough for Roger to qualify for a dividend check with the area  casino. Thirty grand a year for doing nothing more than being a  member of the regional band. He could make much more if he chose to  actively participate in the actual operation, but he didn't. The  casino was at least two hours away and besides, having been to Nam,  Roger figured he'd had enough gambling to last a lifetime or three.  Besides, the casino money was only part of his income. There was the  jerky business, the product sold as Schmatzna-Gaskiwag(r) at stores  all over the county and as far north as a froufrou specialty foods  store his grade school buddy, Eric Revels, ran up in Petoskey called  Gourmet Gobbles. (No one ever came in and asked for it by name. The  combination of the Polish smaczny--\"delicious\"--and the Ojibwe  gaskiwag--\"dried smoked meat\"--amounted to more than a mouthful for  most Fudgies, the weekend tourists from downstate. But they managed  to figure out to ask for \"that local stuff. The . . . you know. That  authentic stuff? The stuff in the Baggies?\" and sales did not seem to  suffer.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDuring the summer, he periodically taught at the short-term dive  school camps a mile out on Lake Michigan aboard a restored  nineteenth-century schooner, and year-round, classes for the National  Guard up in Grayling. During the school year, he was the high school  swim coach. He got great results from those kids, producing two state  champs in the past ten years, and the school board kept trying to get  him to coach more, especially water polo, but Roger said no way.  First of all, he did not believe the water was a place for games.  Even without the aid of an internal combustion engine or oversized  floaties, as used in the more obvious sins of water-skiing,  jet-skiing, parasailing. Even water polo--just flouncing around  hitting balls and carrying on--Roger deemed unacceptable. The water,  he felt, was for meditation and sustenance and life. And in extreme  times, battle, which was part of life. But his official bottom line  for declining was the water polo headgear. \"You shouldn't wear  something on your head when you're in the water,\" he would say.  \"Against my religion.\" If they looked at him blankly, he would shrug  it off with, \"Hey, it's an original people thing. You wouldn't  understand.\" The truth was, nothing with the word \"polo\" in it could  possibly be tolerable.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethere was a song of his people that told, \"If you follow the river  inland through the village, you come to the other lake.\" And lately,  it seemed nearly everyone was coming to the other lake. Years ago  National Geographic had praised it for its clarity and beauty and,  more recently, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous had called it \"a  local gem.\" To Roger Drinkwater's people, it was just  Miinigiizisigami--literally, \"berry moon lake.\" But what they had  meant was \"lake of the moon when berries are picked,\" not because  there were ever spectacular amounts of any kind of edible berries  right around the lake, but just because that's how you say August in  Ojibwe. Due to the shade of its densely wooded banks and the deep  center of the lake, it never got very warm at all, and August was the  only month the unaccustomed could manage getting in the water without  a lot of silly shrieking. Maybe a more accurate translation would be  \"That Lake You Can Really Only Stand During The Moon In Which Berries  Are Picked--Where They Are Picked--Meaning August, Basically,\" but  that wouldn't work on a map.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUnlike most of the place-names in the area, this was one the whites  somehow managed to translate fairly accurately, and for about a  century it was known officially as Lake August. The name change,  leaning back toward the aboriginal, more or less, actually predated  considerably the PC era (as well as this era of influence from the  Indian casino lobby). And it had less to do with being accurate and  more to do with being American: it was World War II and someone--no  one remembers who--took the floor during the \"new business\" part of a  half-empty village meeting and proposed that \"Lake August\" sounded  awfully Germanic. Never mind that it was the name of a month--the  month, specifically, when one's testicles were less likely to retreat  into one's abdominal cavity during a dip--and had nothing to do with  any Austrian baron or Bavarian prince, real or imagined. But somebody  seconded the motion and it soon became Meenigeesis. In recent years,  there had been a small group, mostly of outsiders (those itching to  pave the road that encircled the lake--or worse, Roger strongly  suspected: develop--slap up subdivisions, build more cell towers and  time-sharing condos), who had lately been floating the idea of again  changing the name. These jackasses were favoring the more lyrical  Berry Moon Lake. But, as one old-timer pointed out, when he had the  floor at the village meeting, \"Where the fuck do you see berries?\"  The nearest berries in any great quantity were a few miles out of  town, at vonBushberger's (an orchard, incidentally, so much a part of  Weneshkeen that no one, even back during the war, ever questioned its  Germanic derivation). So for the time being, the Berry Moon Lake  suggestion had mostly been kept at bay by hoots and jeers  and--appropriately, Roger felt--derisive, Archie Bunker-style  raspberries.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBesides, the Indian thing was hip. In fact, the bigger, newer houses  on Lake Meenigeesis--the ones that had recently jacked up the  property taxes--the overblown, rambling four-bedroom affairs that  seemed, to Roger, to make a mockery of the term \"cottage\"--were  mostly on the side of the lake referred to as \"the Indian side.\" It  was a term that had been around before he was a boy and had nothing  to do with the heritage of anyone living in the million-dollar homes  that stood there now. Traditionally, as recently as a hundred years  ago and uncountable time before, this section was the summer  campgrounds of the Ojaanimiziibii band. And then, when they were  Westernized and dragged to the white man's churches and schools and  given haircuts and biblical first names and Anglican surnames and  shoved into pants, the \"Indian side\" was where they homesteaded with  year-round housing, very humble one- and two-room shacks. These  shacks and the slight improvements that followed--stone porch affairs  like Roger's--were the beginnings of the summer cottages on the lake.  As the Ojaanimiziibii population dwindled in the nineteen-twenties  and thirties, whites from town began to buy up these little houses as  summer, weekend homes. More cottages were built around the rest of  the lake--fancier homes compared to the \"Indian side,\" but humble by  present standards. Sometime in the late eighties and early nineties,  when real estate boomed, Roger's neighbors started having to sell  off. These were middle-income whites--skilled tradesmen, public  school teachers--too practical-minded to hang on to property that was  growing rapidly out of their league. But this boom had coincided with  the advent of the casino, and so for Roger, the money was less an  issue. So far, he'd resisted selling. But the rest of the \"Indian  side\"--the cheaper lots with shabby historical cottages similar to  his own--were snatched up by a whole new breed of summer people,  people of wealth on a level that had not yet been seen in Weneshkeen  and hailing from strange locales: a Detroiter who owned his own  security alarm company, the first importer of chai tea in the state  of Arizona, an Ohio man who held the patent on a revolutionary golf  club, and a woman from Santa Monica thought to be the \"Father of the  Fruit Smoothie.\" They constructed cathedrals of glass and exotic  wood, with wraparound decks and paved driveways that sluiced  non-point-source runoff right into the lake. (Or rather, had it done  on their behalf, rarely actually setting foot on the property, as far  as Roger could tell. These money dumps were almost always just  overrun with younger, more annoying people who couldn't possibly be  footing the bill, while the breadwinners were somewhere else--or at  least inside, online--earning more bread.) They \"grandfathered\" their  way past zoning restrictions by demolishing everything but, say, the  original stone fireplace and chimney, then rebuilding around it, as  high and as close to the water as they wanted, using the twisted  loophole that they were \"remodeling\" an existing pre-code structure.  And when the houses got more valuable, everyone's taxes went up and  up, squeezing out more of the merely moderately well-off and their  modest cottages. Some moved over to the increasingly smaller section  of the lake that had once been \"the nice side\" where the \"better  people\" lived. Now Roger was the only Ojaanimiziibii still living on  the lake. Ironically, though he lived on the \"Indian side,\" with his  \"quaint\" little cottage and his nose-thumbing disdain for the lives  of excess all around him, he was considered very misplaced. If a  seven-eighths Indian, one-eighth Pole belonged anywhere at all on  this tony lake, it was certainly not on the \"Indian side\" but maybe  only on the \"nice side.\" If even there.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe was well aware of all this. Things, he felt, were getting so  ridiculous here he wasn't sure how long he could stand it.A Novel","brand":"Anchor","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299933376741,"sku":"NP9781400079940","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400079940.jpg?v=1767740098","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-lake-the-river-the-other-lake-isbn-9781400079940","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}