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.