And Not a Drop to Drink

I was up at a friend's lake cottage this weekend. A beautiful place. A place where you imagine weddings taking place, anniversary parties being thrown, drinking cocktails while watching the sunset. You can watch the sun come up over the hills to the east and set over the lake in the west.

So what did we do?

Drank and played dominos, of course.

Actually, we did do more than that. My first full day there, we did actually manage to leave the house, although I did not take a shower first. This was a complete break with my usual habits, which requires bathing before exiting any building where I've managed to sleep more than four hours. The fact that I left the cottage without showering is an indication of just how relaxed and calm and...I dunno. Is there a word that indicates more than relaxed? Ultra relaxed?

We went wine tasting first. Then back to the cottage for the boat. Then across the lake on a sightseeing excursion. Then to the bar in the little village. Where I proceeded to drink hard liquor.

I rarely drink booze. Every once in a while, I'll pair some kind of fruity vodka with soda or Sprite. But the occasions are so few and far between that they hardly count. The only things I have in my liquor cabinet are wines, a bottle of gin for my mother's martinis and some port for cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving. I have a bottle of vodka that's been in my fridge for about two years now. I just don't drink it.

I had three pint glasses full at the bar. Not full of vodka, but full enough.

We drove the boat home. Our friend, the chef, was to cook us a fabulous dinner and we needed to start the appetizers. In the boat, we had a cooler, some snacks and the radio. My friend, who owns the cottage, had her XM radio up north. She's got the stereo in the house and a boom box that she brings to the boat. When we hit full speed on the boat, we popped the face plate out of the radio and put it in the glove compartment. Safety first.

We get back to the house. Tie the boat to the dock. Unload everything. Time to start cooking. But we need the radio.

"I'll get it!" I shout, running outside, through the grass. The sun was still out in the late afternoon, the light sparkling off the shifting water on the lake. The colors are like those in the Carribean: tan sands under the water close to shore, fading to light blue and green, then turning a dark blue in the deepest parts of the lake.

I climbed onto the boat and dug in the glove box, past old bottle tops, a pair of socks, an empty cigarette box. The detritus that gathers in places where you only spend a season. I grabbed the face plate, closed the glove box and started to climb out of the boat.

I had the face plate in my hand. I know I did. And, in my mind's eye, I can see it falling, end over end, sunlight flashing off the clear front plate. And it goes in the water.

Shit.

I jump in. The water's only a couple of feet deep there. But I jump between the dock and the boat--the place where even non-boat people know not to go. By this time, the radio hitting bottom, bubbles racing up to the surface.

I panic. I basically submerge myself to grab the thing, although I probably could have just leaned over and grabbed it. Instead, I dunk my head in the water, reaching for it with both hands, grabbing it and jerking it out of the water.

"I'm sorry!" I start yelling, as I wade toward shore. "I'm sorry!"

"What did you do?" shouts my friend from the upstairs window.

I start gabbling. The chef wheels out the vacuum and starts sucking water out of the radio with the hose attachment. A bag of ice appears on my leg, which I apparently managed to scrape along the edge of the dock as I was leaping into the water. I sit, bleeding, mentally tabulating the number of items belonging to my friend that I have either broken or ruined. The one night when I broke three wine glasses. The time the burning log fell out of the fire place. The remote control that I pressed buttons on when I didn't know how to use it, forcing her to call the satellite TV guy to come fix it.

"I'm not touching anything of yours. Ever." I look up at her, sorrowfully.

She hands me a beer. "Don't worry about it."

That's how to roll when you're on vacation.

So the next morning, the radio worked, although I almost didn't due to an overuse of red wine. We played dominos, watched the sun move across the sky, discussed Blackwater and restaurants and families and gay men. We went to bed and the chef's restaurant burned down 150 miles away.

I noticed, driving home, that I'd managed to get water in my "water resistent" watch during the daring rescue of the radio. I went to the jeweler yesterday and asked if it could be fixed. They're taking it apart and drying it as I type.

I felt like I had to explain how it happened. Like, it wasn't from washing dishes or jumping in a pool. It wasn't so mundane. I gave the watch repairman a condensed version of the story: the radio, the lake, the rescue.

He looked at my watch. It is about five years old and cost about $100 when I bought it.

"I'd have saved the radio, too," he said.