Mucky Harbor

An interesting fact:

I Googled the name "Mucky Harbor" and I found
not one single place or body of water in
the whole wide world
with this particular name,
EXCEPT,
our Mucky Harbor, which linked me right back to this blog.

In a way, this makes sense.
Why would anyone want their watery retreat or stretch of sand
to be known as a harbor called "Mucky"?

Which beggars the question:
Why, in fact, did we?

Don't know, kids.
It's all in the (literally) murky past.
The Hofman's murky past, that is,
with our increasingly unreliable memories
and also in the geological murky past,
because much of Mucky Harbor has now been dredged out
and is currently a pretty little "hoekje" appendage
on the west side of the lake
with well maintained cottages
and sloping grass lawns rolling down to the water's-edge.

But back-in-the-day,
you definitely needed one of these ....

(the canoe, not the car)
to penetrate the Harbor and to
plumb the depths of what
it had to offer.

This is a Bullhead Lily and these grew there in abundance,
second only to the Fragrant Water Lily (below)
which were even more abundantly abundant.


And .... there were LOTS of these ....

Painted Box Turtles


as well as these ....

your basic Green Frog.

To enter Mucky Harbor
you had to leave behind the lake proper.
As the drone of boat motors subsided
and shrieking sunbathers retreated in the distance
the bow of your canoe would make a V shaped parting
through swaths of this stuff ....

We called it snakegrass.
You can pull it apart and reassemble it however you like,
kind of like Tinker Toys.

Mucky Harbor always conjures up for me
a place of intense stillness.
A place where you could almost see
the fermentation process unfolding as you sat in your canoe,
paddles lightly parting the water behind you.
Except for the plop of turtles belly-flopping off logs
or birds calling to each other from opposite shores
there was very little sound.


Long ago the only "cottages" in this
wrong-side-of-the-railroad-tracks area were ancient cabins
in various stages of disrepair
quietly succumbing to the onward march of nature.
Someone would set out a saltlick for deer every year
but we never actually saw him, or her.
(We saw the deer, though).

Early morning or evening dusk seemed to be
when we most often paddled over to Mucky Harbor;
hence, the landscape would be strangely sun infused in an
etherealish kind of way.
Coming into the gloaming, definitely.

Puts you in mind of this John Muir quote:
"The grand show is eternal.
It is always sunrise somewhere;
the dew is never dried all at once;
a shower is forever falling;
vapor is ever rising.
Eternal sunrise,
eternal dawn and gloaming ... "


The whole area had a very eerie, other-worldy feel to it.
Very beautiful yet somewhat sinister.
Think Ted Kasinsky
(or Al Capone).

Just ignore that screaming bloody murder sound.

We'll "pass" on this theme song

When I was at Baxter Christian
there was a morning ritual called
the sentence prayer that was very much in vogue
(remember, this was the 60s).
The idea was to include the students,
and what a novel idea since we were,
after all, in school.

This is how it usually unfolded ....


Teacher: "Teddy, will you begin our sentence prayer today?"

Teddy: "Sure, Mrs. Vander Schmandersma"

Teddy prayerfully intones,
"Dear Lord, please be with our boys in Viet Nam"
Sally (who sits directly behind Teddy) adds,
".... and all the starving children in Biafra"
Freddy, who's next in the row, contributes,
".... and all the starving children in China"
Betsy likewise intones,
".... and all the starving children in India"
Ricky whispers in a strangulated voice, "pass"
Davy, future missionary, Calvin Sem 1983, pleads,
".... and all the starving children in Outer Mongolia"
Patsy barely gasps, "pass"
and etcetera etcetera etcetera
(all the names have been changed to protect the innocent)

Well, that's kind of how I feel about This Song.

If Mrs. Vander Schmandersma let's us pass on this song
I think I'll take her up on it.

And, if nothing else, this video proves
once and for all
that white people cannot dance.
Please, Dutch white people, do not even attempt to
move with music!
Take it from someone who grew up in the ghetto.


Photo courtesy of Holland Chamber of Commerce

KEEK US and KATOOTLE !!

Katootle is a Hofman word that we use
in place of dang or rats
or for cryin' out loud!

If some event or occasion or procedure
is hopelessly confusing and muddled up
Hofmans exclaim, "What a katootalie business!"

At least,
I think that's what we exclaim
because both of these words are of uncertain origin,
vaguely Dutch sounding,
and used by no one else but us.
I don't even know how to spell them.

but ............

that's what I thought about other Hofmanisms, too,
such as luppee, feese, bahnout, poppetje,
ferfailent, keek us, and last but not least, the heavily used
"Stop your seussing and sonicking!"

and then, y'all,

I discovered that these are REAL WORDS

all of them

and not Hofmanisms or some weirdly mutated
bastardized form of the Teutonic slash Saxon language.

Regardez!!!!

Luppee = lapje, a small piece of cloth.
Feese = vies, meaning filthy or dirty
Bahnout = benauwd, meaning stuffy
Poppetje = poppetje!, little doll
Ferfailent = vervelend, annoying and unpleasant
Keek Us = kijk es, to look
and ... and .... and .... AND

Seuss and Sonic = zoesen en zanikken, meaning to worry, bore, tease,
and to unnecessarily talk about the same subject over and over.
(Insert young child whining, repetitively, "Mama, mama, mama, mama...")

Now,
harken back and
remember how Grandma and the aunts used to whisper,
"Keek us!",
sotto voce,
when a little poppetje was doing something naughty
like getting really vies by jumping in mud puddles,
but you didn't want the little seuss and soniker
to know that you'd noticed
so you went all default language instead?

Yup. I thought you'd remember.

Yes Yes.
I do have a point and
this is it:

KEEK US and KATOOTLE !!

Here we have Sandra Vermeer and Barbara Hoogstrate
and
"KEEK US"
Barbie has a Boa Constrictor Around Her Neck
and Sandy is just really very copacetic with that.


Now we are going to fast forward
and Keek Us a little more.
Here is Barb with her grandson, Donovan,
not really encircling her neck but
kind of clutching at her bosom
and, as you can clearly see,
Barb stills weighs the same as she did
when she was 16
which is just ridiculous
but isn't that little poppetje sweet?

Donovan is the son of Barbie's son Steve,

although in the photo below
I'm pretending to be his mother
(notice pained expression on Steve's face)
with my sister Karen "keek ussing"

Here is Steve a few years later,
free from my clutches

and here he is again
just a couple of decades later
with his andere poppetje, Olivia,
and even though he is a doctor in Oregon
brownie points for wearing that Tiger baseball hat!

Finally, we have the entire Phelps family:
Andree, Donovan, Steve & Olivia
and nobody is seussing or sonicking
but Donovan looks like he just realized
he lost his luppee!

And P.S.
this is really kinda cool because
Donovan & Olivia are the FIFTH GENERATION
of Hofmans at Big Star Lake.

You Can Call Me Al

This guy ....

He of the soggy cigar
and the white fedora
alum of Catholic School 133
(from which he was expelled at age 14)
the Junior Forty Thieves
the Five Points Gang
ringleader of the Chicago Outfit
fiesty inhabitant of Atlanta US Pen,
Alcatraz Island, Terminal Island,
and even this lovely cell in
Eastern State Pen (Philly).

Yes, this is for real people!
Mr. Capone got special permission to decorate his cell
and so,
as you can clearly see,
given his Italian roots and all,
he went with the Tuscan Look.
It must have taken Alphonse weeks
to get that retro/adobe walls/wine-cellary ambience
and I'm pretty sure that he stole that
wooden radio from our house in the ghetto.

Apparently, his time at Alcatraz,
wasn't quite as cozy.
While there, Mr.Capone failed to adhere to
the basic rule that every school kid over the age of 5
can sum up in two words:
"no cuts".

When Al tried to take cuts in the prison barbershop queue,
James Lucas, a Texas bank robber serving 30 years,
pressed a pair of scissors to Al's neck and told him
to go back to the end of the line.
Al wondered aloud if Mr. Lucas knew who he was...
Lucas answered, "Yeah, I know who you are,
greaseball,
and if you don't get back to the end of that line,
I'm gonna know who you were."

Dang!
Better than Once Upon A Time In The West!

And yes, Mr. Lucas did stab him,
although at a later date for an equally "serious" infraction,
and down to solitary confinement he did go.

Well, as we all know,
our Al was a very bad boy indeed,
despite all the aforementioned quaint rehabilitative anecdotes.
His obituary in the New York Times
attributed over 300 deaths to His Chicago Outfitness
due to his creatively inspired gang wars.

That's not to say Al didn't have his good points ....

Here we have the starving and the unemployed
of the Depression era
lining up for Al's free coffee and doughnuts.
I believe this was the
"One doughnut, one vote" line.

Okay okay okay okay.
What does this have to do with BSL? you say.

Because because because because
we all know that Alphonse Capone
liked to hide from the Feds, from the G-men
and from his arch enemy "Bugs" Moran
in Lake County
and we are pretty sure
it was right about here:

Do you see that leetle yellow boat, senoir?
Now do you see that pointy promontory peninsula thingy
directly across the lake from the leetle yellow boat?
Bingo!

This is where, for some reason,
through some overheard grown-up conversation,
or whispered pseudo-ghost story around a campfire
we believed Al Capone was lurking,
no doubt spying on us with his binos
from his perch on the hill
facing conveniently east toward all the cottages
we normally inhabitated
(Strovens, Owens, Elharts, Laansmas, D'Archangels)
plotting our early Hofman demise.

It didn't seem to make any difference
that we were born in the 50s and 60s and
and Al Capone died in 1947.
It just made it spookier.

By the way, there is an excellent post here:
http://bigstarlakehistory.com/capone.htm
that is much more informative than my random Hofman rumors.

Eggbeater Redux

A little feedback on the eggbeater....

Judy VH Alphenaar writes:
"I have fond memories of the eggbeater being
a real boy magnet.
Eunice and I used to take out the rowboat
with the eggbeater attached
and when we saw some cool guys ramming around in a speedboat
we would pretend that we were having motor trouble.
Of course you didn't have to do much pretending with the infamous eggbeater
because just the sight of it made the whole scenario believable."

Bill Hoogstrate writes:
"Not too bad (the photo in the previous post)
but the real eggbeater predates the one in the picture
by quite a few years.
It didn't have any housing on the top
so you could see the whole engine.
On the top was the starter cord
that you had to wrap by hand
every time you pulled to start.
This was originally Grandpa Hofman's motor,
my guess is that it was built in the 30s."

And just for old timey's sake,
here is a little snippetje from a letter
Grandma Hofman wrote to Uncle John & Uncle Wally
when the rest of the clan was at BSL in the summer of 1956:
"Greetings to all from Big Star....
Well, last Saturday when we got here
Dad (Jan Hofman) went in the boat
with Davy (Dave Van't Hof, now 58)
to catch some fish and the motor stalled on him.
He just got it back from Schaeffer which cost
him over $10.00!! (Lawsy mercy! - editor)
Well, you can't begin (sic) much without a motor.
Don (VH) was going back Sunday night and coming back Wednesday night
so early Monday morning Marge (Vermeer) got up
and she took Don to work so she could have
Don's car to take the motor (to the mechanics),
they checked it and it was
OUT OF GAS!

Did you ever hear anything worse?
Dad was without a motor for three days!"

The Eggbeater

Innertubing, tobaganning, skiing,

In general, just going fast,
these were all activities we lusted after
while at Big Star Lake.

In our collective mind's eye
we looked something like this
(if we were female)

Modest, head-covered,
but still having a good time,


or like this,
(if we were male)

Appropriately attired,
but in general kinda insane,
as most boys are at this age.


Unfortunately, none of this was meant to be
for the extended Hofman clan.
In fact, I can almost hear the dominie intoning,
"If the good Lord meant
for you to be tearing around the lake
like a crazed waterskeeter ,
he would have formed you with a
35 hp Evinrude welded to your spine."

On the practical side, two key ingredients were missing:

1. A big boat
2. A big boat with a big honkin' motor.

Now,
the Hofmans had a boat motor,
an inheritance of sorts and in the true Dutch tradition
where nothing is ever discarded or thrown away
simply because it's broken, or out-dated,
or non-energy effecient, or politically incorrect
or in our case, ugly beyond all belief,
we had our family heirloom motor
which we christened
"The Eggbeater".

(not an actual photo but pretty dang close)

Yes. I know. Almost too hideous to behold.


Pictured below is a "real" eggbeater.


If you were to hang over the back of your fishing boat
put this kitchen implement in the water and crank away,
your boat would ( kinda sorta) advance forward
at approximately the same speed as it would
using our vintage "Eggbeater" motor.

I think it goes without saying that we children
and teenagers were too mortified
to be photographed anywhere near
this thing,
and so, sadly, no pictures have been found (yet).

However, I'll leave you with a
very close approximation
of the sound of our Hofman Heirloom
"beating" in your ears:

Days of Yore

A vintage photo of Blue Horizon Resort.
Simple simple pleasures
minus all of the modern trappings

This photo belongs to Donald Harrison's Flickr Photostream
entitled Up North Memories

I think it's rather quaint ...

especially the complimentary boat oars
awaiting vacationers by each cabin door
and the sun dappled lawn leading up to them.

You can almost smell the summer heat
radiating off the spicy sassafras trees
from your computer monitor!

Five more months people
and our vistas and weather will
resemble what we see here.

Can't wait.

Lost and FOUND

A boat load of things get lost at BSL,

or "simply go missing, dahling"
as our British friends might say.

Over the course of time,
where time equals decades
and even generations,
the Hofmans have lost
*in no particular order*


Bikini Tops

actually purloined we think


Boat Motors

just a simulation but it's been
on the bottom of the lake so long
I'm sure it looks uber "vies" by now


Wedding Rings

never found



Sometimes children .... briefly

found



Our appetites

deep fried food with mayo =
heart attack to go


Our way

"I thought we were in Lake County"



All Sense of Modesty

we won't name this child



and .... Countless Fishing Lures


often found in tree branches
or stuck to the back of your jacket



Soooooo .....

it is with deep satisfaction
and unbelievable excitement
and even a little bit of tear-jerky emotion
that for ONCE
we found something
that absolutely made everybody's day.

Here he is ....


with his very happy, huggy,
red-eyes-from-crying owner

This is neither here nor there
but I kinda think these kids are Dutch,
don't you?

Say What !!

It's SUNDAY you say?

Well,

then we'll just fiddle with
these sticks for a while
and try not to fall in!

Incidentally,
since this photo was taken
60 years ago,
these boys are all retirement age now.

Can you guess who they are?

The Package Tour

You know the old addage,
"A picture says a thousand words"?
Sometimes you can capture a day
in just a few, well-placed photographs.

Because there are certain benchmarks that define
every trip to BSL
lets start at the very beginning
(it's a very good place to start)
with the actual road trip up to Big Star.

Tum dee dum,
we're tootling northward for about an hour
before we turn west onto 19 Mile Road,
which bridges the much busier highways
called US 131 and M 37,
and suddenly we're immersed in 1950s Americana.
Our trip even includes a one room schoolhouse.

This one's called Big Jackson School.
Big Jackson itself is just a crossroads
that consists of a school
and a church.
Yup.
That's Big Jackson.


The countryside on 19 Mile is gorgeous.
Lots of gently rolling hills,
grazing cattle, burbling creeks,
farmyards with carefully tended flower gardens,
big red barns that say "Cousineau and Sons"
and hay bales.

The 21st century version of a hay bale

resembles a giant, Euell Gibbons-type
Little Miss Debbie Cake Roll.


And then, naturlich, for our daily dose
of Calvinist guilt,
the ubiquitous roadside chapel.

Let's motor on, shall we?
After our arrival at BSL
we can hardly wait to go
deer-shinin' and scope out
the current deer population.

To make it a true two-fer,
we usually go shining on the way
to another de rigeur pit-stop,
Jones' Homemade Ice Cream.

In addition to its unparalleled ice cream,

Jones' boasts a kind of
in-shop museum that chronicles
very important events in the history of
Baldwin, Idlewild, Marlborough
and Lake County in general.
If I were a teacher, I definitely would
schedule a field trip here.

In the handsomely appointed dining area,
Dave VH and Tom Hofman find plenty to laugh about

despite the towering inferno occurring
just above their heads.


Sometimes we are lucky and our BSL stay
coincides with a VERY SPECIAL OCCASION
called TROUTARAMA.

Troutarama, like all things American,
has very little to do with trout,
and a lot to do with drinking alcohol.

And what is a 'rama without
a Ferris Wheel?


Now we're all very tuckered out
from our first eventful day at BSL.
After we return to our respective cottages,
lie about how many deer we spotted,
how many flavors of ice cream we ate,
how many misspelled road signs we saw,
we collapse into our beds
under the eaves,
and listen to the tree branches
rustle in the wind,
and the acorns plink* plink* plink*
across the roof,
and then we fall asleep.
Priceless.

Big Star Beijing-Style

Did you know digging to China

is a lot harder than the
average backyard hooligan
would have you believe?

It takes FOREVER
and a DAY
and then a month
but, hey, wait a sec ....
Ahoy there, matey
Hannah think's she's spotted something ...

Yes!
It's China!!
It's the Beijing Bird's Nest!!!

Yee - Haw!

This calls for the
Dueling Guitar Hero Competition


Grace is being a gracious winner


and yes that is duct tape,
and not a melted silver medal, on Luke's hand
- we call him Duct Tape Hand Luke -
and no, we don't know why he
always has one wet pant leg.


Then, off to the Scenic Lake Venue
and the Two Man Kayaking Competition
with the One Man Hole

and the "Dew" Quaffing Competition

and the Smore Stuffing Competition.



Grant received 0.0 for execution
since he declined to eat a Smore,
but we did give him an 8.75 for artistic expression



Dave received a 9.5 for execution
but only a 2.5 for artistic expression


Back we go now to the Scenic Lake Venue
for the Staying Under Water The Longest Competition
which Luke won
and it was so totally not fair
because he had scuba gear
and an Oxygen Tank
plus that flag isn't even from a real country

and the Jeremiah Johnson Archery Competion
which takes INTENSE concentration
involving complicated mouth contortions

with arrows that are almost faster than the speed of light!
(check out top right hand corner)



We discovered that blind people
have an especially hard time in this competition
so we let Judy be an "almost winner"



(little side note ....
Did you know blind people
can hunt deer in the State of Michigan
unchaperoned?!?!)

Per usual the over all winner was Cap'n Steve.
Bull's Eye every time.
However ....
later on he tested positive
for excessive amounts of caffeine and self importance.



And our gold medal Beachyball
winners were (sans bikinis) ....
Hannah (Kerri) and Annalise (Misty)



That gold is lip-smackin' good.
Eet Smakelijk, Beijing.



We had only one injury


but luckily our staff of super-qualified
Olympic Trainers and Sports Medicine people
had all the latest technology
handily at their disposal.

Friend or Foe

BSL Wildlife
admired ...

and
abhored ...



Holy Batmobile Robin!

What's that little bugger
doing in a pail ?

Bumstead Ponderosa

Remember the classic kid's book

"Gone-Away Lake"?
Published in 1957, ( a year before I was born),
it's still in print today.

In the book,
during their summer vacation,
Julian and his cousin Portia go hiking through the woods
and discover a place that looks like this:






"...They climbed up on the dock and walked it gingerly,
on the lookout for loose or missing planks.
The reeds that waved above their heads had been replaced
by a growth of plumed grass, still taller,
but as they broke through the last of this,
they found themselves on raised land,
close to one of the wrecked houses
... Now that they were close to it,
they could see what a ruin the old house was,
with broken windows and loose-toothed shutters.
Someone had carved initials into the porch railing,
and on one of the square porch pillars
a crop of fungus stuck out like turkey feathers."

'It looks haunt-y,' said Portia, drawing close to her cousin.

'I'd hate to be here at night. It's bad enough in plain real day.' "






Like Gone-Away Lake
Bumstead Ponderosa is a place where
time marches on,
and like the story in the book ....

"What happened is that the woods came and captured it...

'Something like the story of Sleeping Beauty, ' said Portia.

'Something like the story of Rip Van Winkle, ' said Julian.

'Yes, except that nothing sleeps inside but furniture,
and that's probably gone to pieces by now.
Time gets into anything; yes, indeed it does;
and weather helps it.' "


BTW: 225 feet of lake frontage
VERY private