Saturday, September 19, 2009

BSL Mysteries #6 and #7 ....

.... Or, A Sleuthing We Will Go

We had such a good time at BSL this year
and, as you can see,
I'm pushing my previously set, 5 week deadline
from my last blog entry
to the absolute limit.
Deja vu of every homework assignment and course paper I've ever written.


We had a gazillion people up at poor Billy's cottage,
so Arthur William, if you noticed your water bill
skyrocketing for the month of August,
please forward it to us.


Dave VH built another boat (I know! Just call him Noah)
and he took us on a tour of BSL that rivaled all the
pontooners we see putzing by everyday pointing and gawking at us.
We tried to do likewise, and commented extra loudly
because voices carry so well over water, don't you think?
We said things like: "Look at that monstrosity!
It's as big as a country-club.
How can these people live with themselves?
Children are starving and dying the world over.
Obviously they're not Christian Reformed
or they would've drowned in their Calvinist guilt."

Or "drownded" as my kids say.

Seriously, though,
it's kinda sad to see all the little log cabin
or clapboarded cottages pulled down
(sometimes 2 or 3 in a row) to make elbow room
for huge McMansions that aren't really "cottages" at all.
And no one ever seems to be staying in these things!
Such a mystery,
but READ ON mefrouws and mijneers,
for two more riveting mysteries.


Mystery #6: Oddfellow & Rebekah Camp
We motored by Oddfellow & Rebekah Camp.
Yes, you heard me right.
Odd ( as in weird) fellow (as in man)
and Rebekah (as in Jacob thanking God it wasn't Leah).
Now, wat is dat een naam!
Don't you just love it!
Here it is in days of yore.
(Kudos again to Don Hamilton of Flickr)

The mystery is ....
just what exactly goes on in there.

I realize Oddfellows (and I suppose Rebekahs, too)
belong to the Freemasons and in general are totally normal people that
simply have an unhealthy attachment to intricate rituals.
Just like you, I've read Fried Green Tomatoes
by Fannie Flagg, or maybe it was her other book Daisy Fay,
when Fannie and her friend Pickle
were thrown out of the Order of the Eastern Star
because they were simultaneously overcome with hilarity
during a Very Somber Pledge.

Well, when we've driven into the camp for the annual
BSL Ski Shows
(see below, courtesy of bigstarlake.org)everything LOOKS pretty straightforward:
your basic semi-rundown summer camp,
little white cabins, check
a mess hall, ball diamonds, check check
a tether ball and swingsets and beach, check check check
sooooo .....

where are they hiding all the good stuff?
The swords, the coffins, the eastern star?
Where are the chanting Knights of Templar,
ala The DaVinci Code?
This particular Oddfellow sword was manufactured in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
It seems to say, in no uncertain terms,
"Yo! Don't be messin' with my oddfellows, y'all."


Sue VH drove over to the camp to visit her sister
who was there at the camp as a chaperone
with the Calvin Christian High School Football Team
who in turn were there
for their punt kicker training or male bonding or whatever.
Now how spooky is that? (rhetorical question, people.)
What a letdown.
They found no skeletons that we know of.
Or swords.
Or even a templar
which is kinda like a template or maybe a temple.

Hanyvey .... back to our excursion around the lake.
We did see a wedding in progress on the beach at Snug Harbor,
that was nice,
and several people fishing, ditto,
but otherwise it was All Quiet on The Big Star Lake Front.

As we rounded our bay and headed back home
we were struck with how "our" cottage seemed to pop out from the others
due to the inordinate amount of
rummeltje all over the beach and lawn.
In other words we were struck with what slobs we are.

I said, "Good grief, we're as bad as
The Beans of Egypt, Maine."
a book about a spectacularly trailer-trashy family
and Dave VH responded,
"or as bad as the Van't Hofs of Benjamin and Bemis."
(our ghetto home address).


Then, due to a little inclimate weather
we went on 2 other reconnaisance missions:

Yes, yes, Bumstead Ponderosa in all its dilapidated glory
was calling out to us, like the sirens in the Odyssey.


So we capitulated and prowled around
and stuck our camera lens inside,
periscope-style,
to take a look.

Knotty pine! A fireplace!
An aersol can of Lemon Fresh Pledge!
Bumstead needs a loving owner
before it totally disappears under the
Michigan version of kudzu vine.
But, tangent alert!, this really isn't my second mystery
(other than the fact that no one seems to want to buy this place).

No, the other mystery brings us to our second recon mission,
Mystery #7: Finding the Nook in the Woods

(Postcard contributed by Jack Laansma on bigstarlakehistory.org)

Long story short,
we didn't find it.
Now where could it have gone?
The collective VH memory remembers
turning left off of Big Star Lake road shortly after passing
The Blue Horizon if you were heading away from the Chapel.
In other words, it was on the same side of the road
as The Blue Horizon.

We remember the log cabiny look,
the wagon wheel,
the unpaved dirt or gravel road to get there,
and Dave snarkily calling it "Crook in the Woods".
We fondly remembered all the totally unnecessary
but tantalizing things bored people with money could buy:
miniature fake medicine bottles,
beaded leather belts that lost their beads as you walked out the door,
tiny mailboxes that really opened but alas! could never be used,
Gwen Frostic cards that confused us because they were
painted by a "blind" person.

So, if anyone can weigh in on this puzzling disappearance of
an otherwise fairly substantial building,
here's the place to do it.

Well, all of this detecting and sleuthing
and katootalie business made us
sort of hungry so we went to Dave & Ellen's
and feasted on this:


Pork to the left, venison to the right,
mushrooms and peaches in the middle.
Strange but strangely good.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Tomorrow we will be doing this ....

Relaxing, reading
sunning,
and
eating

We'll report back in 2 weeks
(Okay, maybe 3 or possibly 4,
but definitely in 5 weeks)


Saturday, June 13, 2009

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.

Monday, March 16, 2009

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

Monday, March 9, 2009

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.

Monday, January 26, 2009

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 get 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.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

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!"


Sunday, January 11, 2009

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: