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2002-09-16 - 7:17 a.m.

A friend's recent offhand mention of Lois Lenski and the Missouri Ozarks tugged me back through the years to the large, undisturbed lake nestled in the Ozark Hills. More often than not, a sentimental journey carries the commuter through the tunnels of the past and into the bright light of reality. The revisiting of old haunts brings the time-traveler eye-to-eye with the undeniable face of truth.

My journey was less a Lenski tale, more E.B. White's Once More To The Lake. The tar road had found its way to the shore, leading White and his son to a large lake, surrounded by unshatterable woods and sweet fern pastures and junipers. Yet, where father had rowed as a child, the son cranked the outboard motor, the petulant and irritable sound jarring the illusion of days past.

And so it was with my mind-trip back to Lake Ozark.

As a child my father taught me to love Lake Ozark. A large untamed place, if you discounted the tourist attractions lining the narrow two-lane tar road snaking through the heavily wooded Ozark Hills. We spent indelible days of summer in the tiny, white clapboard cabins at Cap Gross's Resort. Every summer--even if only for two or three days because we had gone to Disneyland or Estes Park or Gettysburg or Washington D.C. or Southern California and Mexico--we made the pilgrimage to swim at the sand beach, fish for crappie in the aging and creaking covered dock, and ride horseback on narrow, primitive trials. For hours I would watch the old wooden CrisCrafts gracefully slice though the water, and dreamed of having my own boat one day.

When I can, I still try to spend sultry summertime days at Lake Ozark. She's still the same large place of my childhood. But she's been tamed. The Ozark bluffs have been blasted, and the black, four-lane highway rushes through in sharp contrast to the limestone cliffs. The Mom and Pops selling soda pop and minnows and potato chips and hot dogs and marshmallows and hand-woven baskets from board and batten shops have been plowed under by chi chi bars and restaurants and the five-hundred-shop discount mall fanning out across the concrete pad of the Ozarks.

Some years ago while on vacation at the lake, I loaded my boat with provisions for a day trip and motored through the wild wakes raging from garish half-million dollar fiberglass boats in search of Cap Gross's cabins. Quiet. Modest. Sheltered by the shade of oak and pine. I spent hours cruising the shoreline bastardized by multi-storied, glass-faced condominiums trying to locate a memory. Contemporary homes with odd angles slashed into the skyline and corporate-owned resorts and golf clubs and spas ate up what had once been heavily wooded bluffs.

Frustrated, I cut the motor and drifted among the angry swells. Eating my sliced beef and cheese sandwich and washing it down with lite beer, I scanned the cluttered and artificial banks through forty-year-old recollections. I had a hard time remembering old Cap Gross's grizzled face. I never did find the old clapboard cabins. But if I ignored the clutter of building around me and looked far down the cove, out past the jutting fingers of land defiled by modern habitation, into the distant, hazy channel, I could still see patches of unblemished Ozark Hills.

Thick with timber, rough and crude at her rocked edge, she was still The Lake. She had changed over the years, her face no longer that of a virginal beauty, but beneath the whore's make-up she was still Nature's child. We could hack away at her and disfigure her, but we couldn't destroy her.

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