Summer homes 4 city people final 1sthalf

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SUMMER HOMES FOR CITY PEOPLE Summer 2013

8 The Middle The Lake is many things, but it is not a donut

11 For A Monday Why must everyone leave on Sunday?

12 The Kestrel The boat to complete a f leet

14 Hooked, Again Summer isn’t summer without it

17 Boater’s Hair It really is so much better than office hair

21 Another Place Moving makes me miserable

24 Southwick Creek A troutish memory

27 A Proper Front Yard Don’t mistake it for your backyard

31 A Great Big Lake Because small lakes are really just ponds

37 This Routine Life is sort of lame without one

40 Fly Fishing Geneva Lake? Fly fishing Geneva Lake

43 A Balancing Act We have it. Everyone else wants it

47 To Boat Or, why I love boats

52 A Far Away Land My cautionary tale

56 A Lost Summer For shame

61 King of the Board It’s way better than being chairman of the board

74 The Laser Tip Maybe I’m not so good at this sailing thing

81 Some Leaves When summer is over, at least we have leaves

ducing any of this content without owner consent is prohibited.

This magazine is published for information and entertainment pur-poses only. Geneva Lakefront Realty LLC is not responsible for any claims, representations, or errors made by the publisher, author, or ad-vertisers. For specific details, please consult your attorney, accoun-tant, or licensed Realtor. Geneva Lakefront Realty LLC is a fair hous-ing broker and limited liability company in the state of Wisconsin.

Cover art an original work by Neal Aspinall. Magazine title, Summer Homes For City People was borrowed from a 1898 real estate brochure called “The Story Of Geneva Lake”, written by F.R. Chandler, under the auspices of the Lake Ge-neva Village Association. Lake Photographs have been provided by Matt Mason.

This magazine was printed by David Curry of Geneva Lakefront Re-alty, LLC. Any questions relating to this magazine or to future adver-tising may be made direct to [email protected]. Repro-

Photography by Matt Mason www.mattmasonphotography.com


There I am again. Sailing with my daughter during some night last summer, just before it occurred to her that she does not, after all, enjoy sailing all that much. The intent of this magazine, now in its fourth year, is not to con-vince you that I’m somehow a great fisherman, or an adequate boater, or a less than skilled sailor or simply a pass-able writer. The idea here is to show you that the life I’m blessed to live at the lake is the same life that’s avail-able to everyone who possesses enough discernment to choose Lake Geneva as their vacation home destination.

I’ll save you the real estate market update in this forward, and instead ask that you follow my blog, which flows with association level and market segment updates on a daily basis. Market updates are best served hot, and to write a vague update for you today is somewhat pointless. I will tell you that our vacation home mar-ket is mending, and the mix of low inventory and increased buyer traffic bodes well for us as we move forward.

For now, I hope you enjoy the 2013 incarnation of Summer Homes For City People. I write this gibber-ish not only as a Realtor with 17 years of full time experience (including $23MM in sales during 2012 alone), but as a grown up kid who knows exactly what a Lake Geneva summer can, and should, be. If you find your-self in Lake Geneva this season and in need of your very own real estate sage, I’d be absolutely honored to help.

David C. Curry Geneva Lakefront Realty, LLC49 West Geneva Street, Williams Bay, WI 53191262.245.9000 [email protected]


The MiddleThe Lake is many things, but it is not a donut

If Geneva Lake were a great big donut, we could be excused for clinging to its edges. If there were glazed waves that pushed the outer limits of the circle, and the interior was as an interior is on a donut--absent--then this would make sense. We would do nothing but ring the circle, again and again, pushing close to the outside and then a little closer to the inside, but we would never go to the inside. Because we couldn’t. It’s a donut, remember? And not some creme filled job with the hole miss-ing. This is a regular donut, with a circle in the middle where no dough, filling, or glaze can rest. And that’s why we can’t boat there, which is why we must boat on the edges. This is how things would be if our lake weren’t a lake at all but rather a donut.

Thankfully, our lake is not a donut at all, but don’t tell most everyone who boats on it. There is an unspoken challenge on this lake, and it pits boat driver against boat driver in a high stakes game of ring around the lake. The winner is he who can success-fully cling as close to the slow no wake buoy as possible. If you’re playing this game with me, and we’re matched in this slowly un-folding game of chicken, I will always beat you. It’s not that I’m happy to always beat you, but I will, for no boater can hang as tight to the slow no wake buoys as I can. But that’s getting sidetracked from our original goal here. The goal is, in case you forgot, to remind everyone that the lake is not a donut and as such it has a very un-der appreciated component: The middle.

On smaller, ridiculous lakes, boaters have no choice but to embrace the middle. They must. There is no other place for them to go. If they ring around the outside, bumping the buoys, they have to depart from this route before they become dizzy from the constant and continual right, or left, turns. This is why small lakes are stupid. On a big lake, like a Geneva Lake, there is ample shoreline to circle, bobbing and weaving and clinging, either to the east or the west but ultimately to the north and the south. This is a big lake and it has big lake turns and big lake shore-line. It also has big lake homes, which is why we cling to its edges and jockey for viewing position. We must be close to the shore if we want to see which owner did what to her house over the off season. And so this is our habit, to circle and cling, to hoard the inside track, to draft off of boats in front of us in hopes of blocking out the boat that trails behind us. It’s serious busi-ness, this outer ring of the lake. With this understanding, and this deeply ingrained form of boat ride, I circled the lake a week ago. I left Upper Loch Vista and headed towards the tall Black Point, and then cut back west, following the buoys and look-ing at homes. I saw a client of mine having great difficulty navigating his boat directly into his slip, so I quickly sped by without nary a wave, to save him from shame. To acknowledge him would have been to claim witness to the spectacle of a difficult boat mooring and make matters all the worse. I am nothing if not thoughtful.

We pushed further west, past Abbey Springs and past Indian Hills and around the cor-ner where Country Club Estates has their lakefront claim. My wife and children were riding up front in the bow, I at the helm, the sun to our left and seven miles of open water to our right. That’s when I made my move. I turned the boat to the right, with-out accelerating, and cruised directly from in front of the Fontana Beach towards the tippity southern tip of Conference Point. I said nothing when I did this. After a few moments, my kids wondered what I was doing. They said this to me. Dad, what on earth are you doing? A reaction to what I had done, as if I had made some disastrous error, as if my judgement had failed me and it was up to a six and eight year old to correct my errant ways. My wife, too, was confused by my route. Was I okay? Was there something wrong? Did we need to be somewhere? Why are we go-ing so slow? And with those questions, the truth about boat rides was made known. The outer ring is for cruising. The middle is for cutting from one point to another while shaking under great RPM’s. I had just de-cided to cruise at leisure, through the mid-dle. Sacrilege! It’s the middle of the lake, and we take it for granted. While skiers and wake board-ers battle for shoreline proximity, there’s a great wild middle being ignored. I cruised that night, through the middle and back towards the point. Other boats wondered

what was wrong with me. Did I need help? Was I misusing bath salts? Was there some reason that I felt I was entitled to cruise at boat ride speed through the middle of the lake? This is what people wondered, but it’s time we stop our preferential treatment of the cruising lanes and explore the deep un-charted territory that exists in the middle. When pulling children on a tube, I never pull them near the shore. I avoid the shore

because, as we’ve just spent all these words discussing, the shore is where the other boaters are. I cringe when I see some yahoo pulling his kids on a tube on a Saturday af-ternoon, hugging the slow no wake buoys as he goes. This is novice behavior. The true pros are pulling their kids in the middle, where there is lessened concern that some other moron will be pulling his kids in your similar path, or worse yet, where some oth-er guy just grabbed the keys to a rental boat

after he spent the afternoon at Champs. Ge-neva Lake can be a dangerous lake at times, but with vigilance and intelligence and a love of the middle, we can all stay safe.

The Middle Of Geneva Lake: Under utilized since Chief Potawatomi first told his son to stay close to the Slow No Wake buoys.

Photography by Michael Moore www.michaelmoorephotography.com



For A MondayWhy must everyone leave on Sunday?

By Sunday, the mood has changed. It doesn’t have to change, this mood, but it does. We have many more hours to spend at the lake, time when we don’t have to think about anything but how we’d like our hull to hit the next coming wave, but we fast for-ward anyway. We think about Sunday night, and the drive home, and the work that be-gins on Monday and carries into Tuesday and devours our Wednesday and somehow Thursday, too. For those who have week-ends to spend at the lake and nothing else, this is how it has to be. If work calls every moment from Monday until Friday, there’s no other option but to hang on to Satur-day and Sunday while they last, and then turn thoughts and cars back to the south.

And if work is the force that pulls us from the water, and changes our shorts for suits and our sun dresses for work skirts, then so be it. As much as we wish it weren’t, success is a general requirement for vacation home bliss, for without one there cannot be an-other, unless you win the lottery. And if you do win the lottery, you don’t buy a vacation home on a sensible lake with those win-nings. You buy swords that once belonged to 15th century leaders, and then you buy trucks for everyone in your family, and, if there’s money left over, you buy a bait shop. But assuming we’re not winning the lot-tery, we’re working, and if we’re working hard and smart and long enough, then we get to have a vacation home. So Sunday thoughts that turn to Monday work are not only to be tolerated, they’re to be expect-ed. If we wish to play we must first work.

But what about everyone else? What about those who don’t have to work on Mon-

day? What about those fortunate enough to have a spouse who will work--who will plant and then chop and then bail the hay--do they have to feel as though Monday is a day that is somehow different from Sat-urday? Why must the towels be washed and stacked inside that large woven bas-ket, and why must the food that might be too old the next Friday be thrown in the garbage that someone has to carry, or drag, out to the road? Why do the beds have to be made on Sunday night and the car packed and the grill covered? Why, if we’re not forced to work today, does today have to be any different from yesterday?

There was a time when families would spend their summers at the lake. If not all of the summer, at least some of the sum-mer, where one spouse would go to work in the city--the dirty, loud, smelly city--and the rest of the family would spend their days in and near the water. There was no rush to get home. For the working spouse, Sunday afternoon thoughts turned to Monday, where those shorts would be replaced by that suit, the one with the pleated pants. But for the rest of the fam-ily, Sunday just felt like Monday which felt an awfully lot like Thursday, and Thurs-day? No one could tell it from Tuesday.

Friday, now Friday was different. Because on Friday Dad (or, mom) would be back, back to captain the boat or fire the grill, back to hear about what he missed out on during that Tuesday while he was work-ing to pay for the events that he missed. He wanted to hear about swimming les-sons at the beach and sailing lessons at the club, and he wanted to know who caught

what off the pier and what it bit on and how it fought. He wanted to know not just what the others had done, but what he had missed. Summer kept churning ahead, even if he had to go and pay for the others to spend those lazy summer days at the lake.

That’s how it used to be, and not general-ly how it is now. Now, Sunday afternoons find almost everyone in a hurry. Sunday afternoons aren’t lazy, not even if for thirty minutes you found your way into a dream while resting your eye lids. Sunday, the whole darn family is in a hurry. There are bags to pack and grills to douse with water and boats to cover with canvas. There are towels to wash and towels to stack, dishes to dry and rugs to straighten. There’s a whole bunch of work and then a car pointed south and a drive home. But for what? Because little Suzy has an appointment at the den-tist? Fine. Then drive home on Monday for the appointment, but leave the towels unwashed and the rug disheveled. Leave the cottage as it was on Sunday, and find your way back to it on Tuesday. If there isn’t work dictating your absence from the lake, then your absence is not excused.

From my office desk, I can see Monday out-side. It doesn’t look anything like Sunday. It looks calmer. Lazier. It looks as though today could come and go and no one would particularly notice. Monday isn’t a race against the thoughts about Tuesday, it’s just a nice day at the lake. You should really find some more time to see what a Monday feels like, because just a few more Mondays from today there will be school and once there is school there is fall and after fall comes winter, and then we’re all in real big trouble.


The KestrelThe boat to complete a f leet

When you buy a sailboat, it’s only natural that the wind refuses to blow. There isn’t re-ally any reason for it to. You have your sail, you have your boat, you have a very tall mast to hold the sail up above the boat, and now the only thing you need is wind. It doesn’t matter if the boat is fast or the sails bright, if the wind won’t cooperate, what you have is a buoy ornament. Buoy ornaments are expensive, but common, and if you’ve ever sat in a screened porch and watched such a tethered ornament float in the blue water beyond your pier, then you know that with wind or without it, sailboats are pretty fun.

Several weeks ago, in the middle of my lost summer, a new boat joined the Curry fleet. If we were to go to war against some other boat owning family, we would likely lose. None of these boats of ours are particularly fast. None are particularly fabulous. But each has its place in any sporting fleet, and each will do just fine if deployed to duty or left to hang in its slip or cling to its buoy or rest on its lift. It isn’t easy to amass such a fleet. Lest you think this fleet was cobbled together dishonestly, or through exces-sive use of fast money, I assure you that the fleet is now 40 years in the making and that the sum of its cumulative parts do not to-tal the price paid for a decent used Cobalt.

First there was the Chris Craft. The one I’ve written about here before and the one that I am still not permitted to drive. And then there were other boats, a red Laser sailboat with a heavy hull. That hull be-came so waterlogged that the boat had to be laid to rest many years ago, which was sad, unless you didn’t care about that boat. Which I didn’t. And then a Boston Whaler, a Montauk with powder blue interior and

a shaky mahogany center console. If you took the boat for a ride back in the late 80s or early 90s, it was best to tighten as many console screws as you could before you left, and then tighten them all again once you returned. And if you ever drove it to Hansen’s gas pump in Williams Bay to fill up the tank and only after filling it you re-alized that you hadn’t brought any money with, it’s not really a big deal. Mel forgives.

When that Whaler was sold to make way for a (rather horrible) teal striped Sea Ray, things were getting better. This was our first bow rider, our first I/O engine, and the first boat that seemed like it mattered. But it didn’t. And soon after, it was sold to make way for an identical Sea Ray, only this one traded the dreaded teal accents for blue ones. It was better, but not great. It was also small, and anyone captaining a 19’ bow on Geneva during a sunny July weekend will know that small boats aren’t just painful to look at, they can also be dangerous to drive.

When the teal and then blue Sea Rays had run their course, another upgrade was in or-der. A blue boat again, but a Cobalt. A deli-cious, blue, Cobalt. There were other boats, too, a South Coast sailboat, my famed, if smoky, Pursuit fishing boat, and another Laser with an unrotted hull to replace the red hull that hadn’t fared so well during the winters it spent uncovered on sawhorses on my parents’ front lawn.

But those were just the boats that lead us to now, to the newest addition. To the new sailboat that looks curiously like the old sail-boat. This boat, a Bridges Point 24 named Kestrel, is the only one of its kind on Ge-neva Lake. There is some pride in that, as

even the Hinckley at House In The Woods has to share the water with at least two other Hinckleys. The Bridges Point is a Joel White design, a name that means nothing to you unless you’re either related to Joel or you’ve been following sailboat design for the latter half of this past century. Joel is dead now, but the Bridges Point isn’t what killed him.The sailboat was bought from New Jersey, and I’m certain that as happy as we were to see the boat arrive on the shore of Geneva Lake, the boat was indeed happier to be freed from New Jersey’s salty grip. The lines are graceful, classic, the power an inboard diesel, the sails big and white. The wood rub rail is quite glorious, as is are the wood ac-cents and the contoured seats that look as though they might be uncomfortable but are, in fact, quite pleasing. There are all sorts of lines and gadgets, and as guys who sail with the sole intent of raising a sail or two and catching the angle of a little wind, most of these extra accoutrements are lost on me and my father. Thomas, having been the only one to attend any form of sailing school, like-ly knows more about this boat than we do.

There are hesitations with this boat. The only sailing I’ve ever done prior to this has been on a Laser. When you tip a Laser com-pletely over, you just climb up on the center-board and your weight pulls the boat right again. When you dump a Bridges Point, you must call the insurance man and hope your coverage includes user error. Nonetheless, the Kestrel handles brisk winds with ease, and the low belly allows those on the low side to carelessly drag their hands through the lapping waves. But this is to assume that the boat is being sailed, and this is to as-sume that there is wind to push. Maybe it’ll be windy tomorrow.


Hooked, AgainSummer isn’t summer without it

They say that some people wear their hearts on their sleeves. Those same people would never say that some other people wear their soul on their sleeve. They couldn’t. Souls are too deep to ever drape over your sleeve. They’re not easy to show, and that’s because they reside much deeper inside of us than our anxious little heart does. It’s this depth that lets some of us hide our souls from others, always keeping it tucked inside even while we display our heart for anyone who dares look towards our fore-arms. It’s because souls are so deep that I was surprised one evening a few months ago when I found a way to catch mine.

Or, hook. That would be the better de-scription of what had happened. To catch something generally means to have done so on purpose. If I catch a football that’s because someone threw it in my direc-tion and I located it in the air with my eyes before reaching out to grab it with my hands. If I catch a kitten that fell out of a tree, then that’s sort of the same as when I caught that football. I saw, I anticipated, I grabbed. That’s why I didn’t so much catch my soul the other day, I hooked it.

The hooking started in the way that most of my hookings have started. Me, a boat, some water around me, and a fishing pole in my hand. It was a beautiful night, that night. It was calm and warm, but not so warm in the way that some summer nights from last summer were. It was warm, the winds I barely considered winds, and the water a deep mid-summer blue. It was the sort of night that makes me wonder why

anyone would ever want to spend it any-where else. I chugged over to the East end of the lake that night, as far East as anyone can boat without hitting shore. I had to pick up a friend, my fishing companion for the evening, and as I had driven that great distance to the other end of this lake I de-cided that we’d fish there first. So we did.

The fish cooperated, and perhaps two or three northern pike swam into our lures and then swam towards the boat and then offered up their hooked faces for me to fix before swimming back towards the deeper water where they came from. It was a fun time. Sailboats lowered their sails and motored towards their buoys, passing us without saying a thing, and another summer night appeared to be fading away without the slightest hitch.

I don’t know the East end of the lake all that well, in terms of reading weedlines and breaklines, and those sorts of underwater features that one cannot be expected to know casually. When we crossed Geneva Bay, it seemed like the thing to do. And when we arrived at the North Shore some-where around Forest Rest, it seemed rea-sonable to troll West, towards where the sun had just set. We weren’t fishing with much conviction, as I rarely fish with anything re-sembling patience, or endurance, which is probably why I’m not really all that great of a fisherman. But more on that soon.

The way I fish now on a summer night isn’t the way I used to fish on summer nights. I was brought up fishing with night crawlers.

Lots and lots of night crawlers. We didn’t use leeches like some other fisherman did, mainly because they are horrible creatures and no one in my family- not my grandfa-ther, or uncle, and certainly not my own fa-ther, were up to the challenge of acting like holding a leech while hooking it isn’t the creepiest thing imaginable. This worm fish-ing is not how I fish now. I fish now mostly with a floating yellow line and a very small fly, but when I’m in Geneva and I’m fishing there are usually two rods stuck into the gun-wales with large crankbaits dangling from the tips, twisting in the wind until deployed.

I like trolling this way. I think it lulls me into thinking that I’m aboard Pilar, with my thick braided lines dragging through the great blue river, splashing a cut Ladyfish along the surface or skittering just above and below it, working to tempt a gullible sailfish into striking. The fish that summer night hit the way any northern pike will hit a trolled plug in a freshwater lake. He hit hard, bending the rod and stripping the line. Fish on! It sounds exciting, and for a brief moment it is. The fish pulling for line, the fisherman cranking some of it back onto the spool. The shame of it is that northern pike are big on initial introduction but make for very boring, very clumsy dance partners.

My friend grabbed the rod when it bent and set about cranking in the medium sized fish. It was a normal fight, following the normal pattern. Big hit, initial fun, followed by a boring retrieve where the pike twirls through the water en route to its date with its captor. When the fish was near the side

of the boat, I did as I have done hundreds of times before. I grabbed the pliers from the dash and reached over the side of the boat to unhook the fish without even handling it. There’s little reason to hold a northern pike, unless it’s so large that it will make it to a bare office wall. This pike, falling some-where on the light end of 2 feet, was des-tined for no great fame. Just a quick release and memory forgotten even quicker. Somewhere between the typical motion of reaching out with my pliers and securing the hook end of the lure, this fish decided that it was not done. It was not going to go without a fight, even if it would have been easy to mistake for an enemy that gave up shortly after the hooks from that wooden perch pulled tight in its craw. In a blink the fish launched upward, careening against the side of the boat. My outstretched hand had dropped the pliers into the lake and the hooks that were once secured only in

the fish’s mouth now featured the back treble hooks still where they were- in the fish’s mouth, and just one of the front set of trebles buried deep inside the last joint of my index finger. I had one hook in me and the others in a very angry, surprisingly strong, fish. The hook in me wasn’t just in my skin, it had traveled through my skin and past some blood and deep into the tis-sue that wraps around bone before ending up lodged, pointy side down, into what was surely the deepest recess of my soul.

I grabbed the fish quickly, hugging it tight-ly. Hugging it to make it stop shaking, as with every shake of its head the hook pulled deeper into the front side of that finger. I hugged the fish and sat down, my friend excited for all sorts of wrong reasons. The hooks that were in the fish were in the cor-ner of its mouth, the spot where every fish-erman knows is the spot that might be the toughest spot to remove a hook from. My

friend tugged at the hook to free the fish. The hooks didn’t give. We needed pliers. Pliers! The pliers that I had dropped when the fish made its move. I sat. My friend ex-claimed. The fish squirmed.

After some tugging, the fish was free, and I dropped it into the lake. I felt bad for hug-ging it so tightly. I worried that I had killed it, and I worry now about that, too. I didn’t mean to, but if I did, it was a fish for my soul, which seems like a fair trade to me. The fish now released, I cut the line with my teeth and my friend made gestures that proved he thought he could just tear the hook from my finger. Barbs forbid that, so I grabbed the steering wheel with my un-injured hand and drove West, back to the pier, back where I might walk up the lawn and drive away with my new perch themed jewelry. The hospital would know how to fix me up. They always do.



Boater’s HairIt really is so much better than office hair

I doubt that anyone will, at any time in my life, consider me to be a swarthy sort. My skin will wrinkle prematurely, a condi-tion owed to a life spent in the sun with-out appropriate protection. My hair will gray, as it already is, pushing back from my temples until the two sides meet. My arms will never be sinewy in the way that a true swarthy man’s arms should be, with gross veins popping in odd places between his fingers and his elbow. I dress sort of swar-thy at times, with clothes meant to remind someone of the lake and of a life that ac-companies that lake, be it my big blue one or giant salty one. I wear sandals a lot, but even this cannot elevate my generally soft existence into the realm of swarthiness.

I stood on the bow of my boat last Saturday night, casting aimlessly around and into the school of cisco that had pushed their way to the surface as they tend to do around night-fall on Conference Point. I’ve never caught anything while casting into these large swimming schools, but past performance isn’t indicative of future results and that phrase cuts both ways. One day I’ll catch something fishing like that, but that one day was not to be this past Saturday, so I cast and I cast with nothing to show for it but some twisted line. I wasn’t wearing a hat.

There were other boats around, one full of fisherman fishing, another with a man and a woman, alternating casting and kissing. No one was catching anything, as far as I could tell. I started my fishing

deep, allowing the lightest of southeast breezes to push me towards the shore and closer to the other boats. I enjoyed fish-ing at first in the deep, surrounded by the ciscos, if for no other reason that I was aware that the shallow boats felt that I was onto something. That I had somehow out-smarted them. But I hadn’t. I never out-smart anyone or anything while fishing.

Once I had sufficiently fished and come to the familiar consensus that either, a) the fish weren’t biting, b) I wasn’t fishing with the right lure, c) there were no fish anywhere near my boat, or my personal favorite, d) there were fish there and my lure was fine but they still had no interest in it, I sat down on the captain’s chair and ran my fingers through my hair. I didn’t do this in the way that someone might romantically run their fingers through another person’s hair, instead I did it as a way to suggest resignation, frustration, tempered with a touch of relaxation. I did it because I was signaling to myself, to my fishing companions in the other boats, to the ciscos and to the night, that I was done. When I did this, I realized that I had been fishing amongst strangers with my hair puffed and pulled and accidentally teased to its absolute highest. I had boater’s hair.

Boater’s hair is not to be confused with crazy person’s hair. They are entirely dif-ferent. Boater’s hair is always different but it is always the same. The hair, once tamed and docile and coerced into a pattern or a

shape, has been set free by the wind and the sun and the humidity. It is hair as hair was intended to be; wild. For some, the spread between work hair and boat hair is a wide abyss. For others, like me, work hair and boat hair are quite similar, with merely a few more hairs pressed into place for the work variety. But on this night, on that great sea, with those ciscos under me, my hair was as wild as wild could be. I had boat hair, and I liked it.

Sitting at your desk today, you should be able to spot those with some leftover boat hair. It’ll be some guy with most of his hair in place, but one clump in the front, off to the side, that refuses to lie flat. It refuses to submit to the gel or the spray, and instead it wishes to be free like it was yesterday, blowing in the lake wind, bouncing over waves and swells. It’ll be some lady, with her normally flat hair a bit more volumi-nous. A little bit wild. It will be mostly as it normally is, but with some of it free and flowing, as it remembers the day before spent under the sun and blowing in the breeze. These people today will look like they are working, and they will be, but their hair will be wishing it was already Friday.

Be cautious around those people who spend the summer without a hint of boat hair. They cannot be trusted. If you cannot tell the dif-ference between swarthy boat hair and finely coiffed work hair, and those who sport ei-ther, then it has been too long since you let your own hair free of its molded constraints.

SUMMER 2013

A p R E M i E R M U S i c A l E x p E R i E n c E i n A b E A U t i f U l l A k E S i d E S E t t i n g

PLATINUM SPONSOR

GOLD SPONSORS

HonoraryPresenting Sponsor

Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Bandwith special guestAnn Hampton CallawaySaturday, June 29 One of the most exciting large jazz ensembles partnering with a leading champion of the great American Songbook

Lee Greenwood: American PatriotSaturday, July 6 The country music star who makes everyone feel proud to be an American in a special program of country songs and original compositions

Gala of Stars: The ReunionSaturday, July 13A review of “top hit” selections from past Music by the Lake productions with original stars and full orchestra coupled with great tunes for future presentations

Teatro! Theatreland’s First SupergroupSaturday, July 27 From “Evita” and “Phantom of the Opera” to

“Les Misérables,” this dynamic men’s quartet brings musical theatre roaring back in a show-stopping extravaganza

FAMILY AND CHILDREN’S CONCERT

PRITZKER SPOTLIGHT CONCERT

The Canadian BrassSunday, August 4 • 4:00 p.m.

“The fabulous five,” imitated by many, now in their 31st season of presenting classical, jazz and pop selections with consummate musicianship, theatrical effects and huge audience appeal

An Evening with theDoobie BrothersSaturday, August 10 • 7:30 p.m. The legendary rock band synonymous with a breezy California pop sound that gained popularity in the 1970s and remains a favorite of music fans today

MAIN STAGE SERIES Performances begin at 7:30 p.m. SUNDAY AT 4 CONCERT

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N1824 East Valley View

It wasn’t long ago that I would have looked at modern architecture and sneered. It didn’t make sense to me, this modern vi-sion. I didn’t care for the angles, the lack of symmetry, the nonsensical spaces. For this life long disdain of all things contemporary, I blame the Jetsons. As an adult, I now see past the modern stylings of Jetson’s fame and have recently begun to sincerely ap-preciate modern design done well. In fact, I dabbled with a modern design before embarking on my own build, but in the end shied away from it for fear of doing it poorly. Modern design, if done well, can be beautiful. Modern design done poorly can be an absolute disaster. I played it safe. The house on Valley View has not played it

safe. Designed and built in the mid 1980s, this modern home is recognizable to any-one who has spent any amount of time on or near Geneva Lake. Set amongst back-ground of older estates of classical design, and intermixed between the newer estates of traditional design, you’ll find this and a few other modern style homes on these friendly shores. Today I bring to you this modern example, and trust that you, like me, will find the design to be redeeming.

Valley View Drive isn’t a drive that some-one can happen upon easily. You must drive down South Lakeshore Drive and then head North on Maple Ridge. When you come to the intersection of Black Point Road, you can turn West to head

towards that black point, or you can turn East, and head to Valley View. Few peo-ple turn East. If you went straight a dis-tance, you’d crash headlong into the Owl Tavern. Once you come to Valley View, you should take the entrance flanked by red brick pillars, and proceed slowly down the winding gravel drive that leads through the woods towards the lake.

When you get close, you’ll see this mod-ern stone manse directly ahead, the lush gardens offering you your first greeting. The home rests nicely on a 1.25 acre lot, and boasts 150’ of big, fat, sprawling front-age. The views are to the north, towards Elgin Club, and the views are most im-portant here, as nearly every room puts

the lake unavoidably in your gaze. The lakeside deck is large, the front lawn lev-el, the steps to the pier not so many that you’ll have to stop and rest half way back up. The property is wonderful, but the true magic of this home is on the inside.

A long hallway spans the first and second floors, connecting the extreme edges of what is a very large house. The first floor offers comfortable living spaces- a den with fireplace, a great room with another, a dining room with an angled 60’ skylight running both in front of and behind it. The hardwood floors are delightful, the built in cabinetry everywhere, the flow perfect. The kitchen has gourmet touch-es- new granite counters and appliances

from Sub Zero and the like. Entertaining? Why, yes, you’ll find that an easy task here.

Upstairs there are two bedroom suites, each with fireplaces and private baths and great wide lake views. There’s an office here too, or a library if you’re the more casu-al sort, with a view of its own. The long hallway is illuminated by huge skylights, and that lakeview finds you again on the open staircase that connects the upstairs to the rest of the house. The lower level is exposed, leaving the lake once again the main attraction. There are two more bed-rooms down here, with a large rec room and bar area eager to host ping pong championships. Don’t invite me to those competitions, I’ll win. It’s true.

There’s more down here too- a sauna and a couple more bathrooms and a walk-out directly on to the lakeside deck. The theme here is unmistakenly casual, with the lake as the focal point of all activities at all times. The design is modern without being cold or even the list bit sharp. The stone that runs through the outside and the inside of this home providing some warmth that might not otherwise ac-company a modern structure. It’s a great house, a great lake house, and it’s yours for $4.195MM.


Another PlaceMoving makes me miserable

I am moving. The word moving is interest-ing. It is a word and movement and a mo-tion at once. To say I am moving is to present motion, and though movement can be slow and tiresome, it can also be lightening fast and sudden. The sort of moving I’m doing is both, at the same time. I am in constant mo-tion both now, and forever, moving and mov-ing and running and running, doing exactly what that old Alabama song told me not to. I’m in a hurry to get things done, all right.

This afternoon, while smart people splashed their way over and through big blue waves, I instead made several trips from my old house and to my new, even more temporary house. To understand the way this works, you must understand something about me. I am cheap. I am inherently, seriously, constantly cheap. I spend money on lots of things, lots of mon-ey, but I feel bad each time I do. I crave retail therapy, and there are times that I will drive to a city center and find the stores there just so I might buy something. Buy anything. It matters little what the object of that tempo-rary affection is, I want it and then I feel bad about getting it. I am a remorseful spender.

The cheapness isn’t something I came by sud-denly. It was programmed into my DNA. My father spent his entire life mastering the art of being cheap. As kids, we only went out to eat when he sold a house. When I was very young, I don’t remember this. When I was older but still under his roof, we went to eat after those sales, but by the early 1990s those sales were not so often. But when we did go to eat, we didn’t order anything to drink. And we didn’t order an appetizer. It was only long after I became a full fledged adult that I realized people often ordered both of those childhood delicacies, even at the same time. My father’s cheapness is now my own.

Even so, this cheapness goes to the heart of why I spent the afternoon schlepping untidy

car loads back and forth from house to rental and back again. It also explains why I worked systematically from room to room, wiping down walls and then trim, vacuuming the base and the outer reaches of the carpet with the hose and then vacuuming the entire floor last. I did these things in a fairly warm house on a very hot day, and while I worked the oven was set to self clean which filled the house with toxic fumes. I’m not a fireman; I don’t work well when enveloped in smoke. I worked through the hot haze and alternately wiped and scrubbed and vacuumed. And when I came to a stray bit of carpet yarn I snipped it off with the sharp little scissors that I found on a river bank up north last fall. EJM, whoever you are, I appreciate the fact that you dropped your fancy little multi-tool. I saw it glint in the sun and picked it up because, you know, I’m cheap.When I was younger, these moves didn’t seem so bad. The motion was a challenge, and I was nothing if not up to it. It is no longer a secret that I am 34 years old. I used to keep my age a secret when I was 18, but that was to hide in-experience. Now I have experience and some form of success and I have white hairs multi-plying on my temples. There are more of them today than there were yesterday, and there will be more by Friday when my move is over. I have been married almost 11 years, and in that time I have moved 8 different times. This home sale will be the eighth piece of property I have personally owned and then sold, ninth if you count a supremely lucky dabble into Marco Is-land circa 2005. I have made a profit on each of those sales, which matters little to you un-less I’m a Realtor and you’re a consumer and you need someone to trust with your real estate moves and would prefer to trust someone who has actually, you know, sold some real estate.

Those prior moves were all harried and they were all stressful, but there is something differ-ent this time. This house was on the verge of becoming a home, and I feel a tinge of sadness about the move. I trade real estate like others

trade cars, except I trade real estate more often than those car traders trade their automobiles. I have little affection for real estate and view a house as a house, never or rarely as a home. This house I felt at home in. It’s a strange feeling, you know, having some attachment to real estate.

It’s not that I don’t feel an attachment to real es-tate, it’s just that at 34 I still feel attachment to the home that my parents made for my broth-ers and me. It’s on the lake, in case you haven’t been paying any attention at all, and that house hasn’t been my home for 16 years. The funny thing is, that house is still my home. I feel the attraction to it in a way that I don’t feel towards any other house. And in that, I’ve realized my housing problem. I don’t feel the need to create a home for my own family because that brown Dutch colonial at the end of Upper Loch Vista is still my home. This understanding is now the start of remedying the problem. I’ve selfishly felt at home while my own children have yet to live in one of their own.

Houses are houses and homes are homes and I’m telling you that they are not the same thing. So it is today, July the second, just a few days before I scrape and wipe and paint my way out of another one of these houses, that I promise something to you and to me. The next house I build will become my home. I’m done with this motion. I’m tired of it. I’m older than any 34 year old should ever be, and it’s time I actu-ally grew up and put a heavy heeled foot out to slow down this dangerously fast life. It’s time to trade one last house for my first real home. I’m going to put an item in the corner of a room and leave it rest there until I can no longer re-member when I put it there or what it was put there for. I want to forget about things under a bed or on a shelf in a den. I want to move in and never move out. I want to keep moving forward, but I want the movement to be that slow kind, the sort I’ve only read about. Your job is to hold me accountable.


1622 Lakeside Lane

When I listed and then sold the house at 1621 Lakeside Lane last spring, I didn’t do so because of some remarkable, inspired sales job. It wasn’t that I properly highlighted the make of the kitchen faucet or the serial num-ber on the back of home theater projector. I sold the house because the price fit the mar-ket, and because my explanation of the mar-ket was accurate. I serve buyers and sellers, yes, but moreover I serve the market. That’s why I’m not good at talking people into overpriced homes that buck the context of their individual market, and that’s the same reason I’m good at directing buyers towards value- both the immediate kind and the last-ing sort. It’s because I serve the market that I can tell you without hesitation that 1622

Lakeside Lane is worth your time. From the exterior and at first blush, all of the homes in the South Shore Club are both large and fancy. But this glance test doesn’t matter much once the home is no longer just some piece of lakefront inventory and is, instead, the target of your vacation home desire. Once this transformation occurs, the home is subjected to great scrutiny. At this point, the finishes must not only be beauti-ful but they must be intact, and polished, well maintained and cleaned and ready for the next owner and the next chapter. This is where many homes fail. They look pretty, but behind all that slate and copper lies so much dust, and plenty of dings too. This is

the norm, but 1622 Lakeside is as that boat that rests in the Esplanade at Marco- Far From Normal. If the location was all we cared about, this home will take that cake and then greed-ily devour it, spilling barely a single crumb. The home is positioned right up front in the Club, with a lakefront presence and an east-erly tilt to the design that offers up huge lake views and shields the level, lakeside stone patio from the blistering afternoon sun. This home is a pleasant perch lakeside, with no inconveniences blotting the view of water and woods, offering the rare ability to live exactly in the same manner as a lakefront home in another location might. Just house,

stone patio, manicured lawns, and a few steps beyond those to the pier. The differ-ence here, of course, is that you don’t have to nag the lawn guy to mow the lawn and once you’re at the pier you have little to do except decide which water chariot will deliver your next ride. These conveniences are part of the pampered life within the South Shore Club, a rare assault of luxury that requires no mon-etary consideration aside from the monthly association fees. Those fees, it should be noted, are so much cheaper than those ex-penses that would be incurred by a lakefront owner elsewhere, and that lakefront owner elsewhere wouldn’t have a fleet of boats, a swimming pool, a clubhouse, a tennis court, and concierge at their disposal.

The house itself is a Pickell built home of su-perior finishes and style. It has none of the odd indulgences that have come to mark some of the homes in the Club. There are only the highest end of finishes built into a home on this extra wide lakefront lot. The great room opens onto a generous lakeside patio, level and pleasing, with nothing be-tween that patio and the water excepting a striped swath of green. There is a lakeside screened porch, a necessary element for any true lakefront experience. The kitchen will stand out as impressive in a line up of impressive kitchens, with Viking appliances and marble counters and a most pleasing lay-out that will easily host many cooks at once.

Outside of the club, positioned on a typical 100’ lakefront lot, this home would easily fetch $5MM, perhaps more, and then the home would be flanked by lesser homes of lesser appeal. As it sits now, this lakefront home at $3.485MM is positioned to be the next sale in the South Shore Club. If you come to see this home, expect to tour a most amazing home that will appear as though you are about to become its first owner. And expect to be surprised by the lakefront loca-tion that competes with any and every pri-vate lakefront home you’ve ever seen.



Southwick CreekA troutish memory

I think I’m too young now to know what I’ll remember when I’m old. It would be fool-ish to suggest that at 34 I somehow know what memories I’ll cherish when I’m 74, just as it would be foolish to assume that I’ll have a chance to live that long. There are memories from my childhood that I have, memories shot in sepia, fragmented, disjointed but somehow still those snip-pets create a smooth trail of memory from a wonderful youth. But there are other memories from high school, memories that are old but not so old that they’re en-tirely foggy in the way that a memory from some day during your fifth year might be. Those high school memories can be about high school, or girls, or cars, and they are, but the memory from that era that I might cherish the most when I’m sitting my old bones in some old chair will involve trout.

Or the hope of a trout. There weren’t really any trout in these memories, because from here I haven’t yet become confused as to the reality of the memory. The memory has had no time to blur the edges between truth and exaggeration, or between exaggeration and outright lies. These memories are fresh, and there weren’t really any trout of mine in them. The fact is, there was a trout, and that trout that wasn’t mine has become as last-ing as any memory that I have. I pursued that trout for years, and on dark fall days like this one I can’t help but think about that trout and the nights I spent looking for her.

This first trout was the most important trout. It appeared out of no where, an un-expected introduction into my life that I welcomed at the time, but only celebrated later. I was riding my bike, heading West back from somewhere in the East, and I had just ridden over the wooden footbridge that spans the slow Southwick Creek in

Williams Bay. You know, that bridge that everyone takes pictures of for some rea-son, and for some other unknown reason it’s the bridge that the Village of Williams Bay decided to paint on their cumbersome entrance signs. It had been raining that day, so the bridge was slick with leaves and slick with that fall rain, but I must have pedaled up to it and slowed to see what Mel Hansen was fishing for, or what he was catching. He stood on the bank, though in my memory he is sitting, and he cast his old lure out with his old fishing pole, and he was patient.

Back behind me Mel had his truck, and while I remember now Mel driving his am-bulance for years, I think this was a truck and not the ambulance. How else would I have seen the giant trout that was to be the first and last large trout I had ever seen come from Geneva Lake? It was flopping in the bed of that truck, and had Mel not been close I would have clutched that trout in my arms and released it into the lake before anyone even noticed. But I didn’t do that, I just stood there, dumbfounded as a 12 year old, amazed at the size and make and bril-liant color of that strange fish. I wheeled back to the bridge and watched Mel some more before peddling south past where Bay Shore was about to be built, and down along the shore path home.

That trout is seared into my memory, and the scenery from that day I can see just as clearly today. The lake was silver, and calm, and the stream was flowing a bit quicker than normal because of the recent rain. It was cold, but not so cold that ice was on that wooden bridge, and not so cold that any steam drifted up from the surface of the lake. I was too shy to replicate that fish-ing scenario right away, as it wouldn’t be respectful of me to fish in the same spot

that Mel was fishing, and so I didn’t fish there for quite some time. Not until I was in high school, and Mel was too old to fish there any longer, then I’d find my way down to that stream and fish for those trout.

Mel would still sit in his ambulance and watch the October or November water from the first parking spot to the East of the stream. And I’d still drive down on fall nights after a fall rain and I’d cast Lit-tle Cleos or soak small bags of red spawn, and I’d wait for my trout. I’d fish where Mel fished, and I’d cast like Mel cast, and I’d wait like Mel waited. I did fish time and time again, night after night, year after year; my cars changed a few times, and my fishing poles did, too, but I never, to this day, found a way to catch a trout like I saw flipping and flopping in the back of Mel’s truck that day.

I hooked one once, and struggled against it for a few seconds, maybe more, but that was it. It had bit a spawn sack, and while I assumed then that it was a trout, it might have been a turtle or a carp or Old Greg, anything but a trout. I prefer to remember it as a trout. There was one other trout, too, a trout that I found resting out of the cur-rent further up the stream one day around that time, and there’s a picture somewhere of my brother and I down in that stream. I’m holding a trout, a big one, but not so big as the one that Mel caught, and my brother and I are smiling and we’re acting like we had caught that fish when in fact we had scooped it up with our hands. Fish can’t get away too quickly when they’re in a stream that barely flows with the pressure that re-leases from a kitchen faucet.A day like today I’m thinking about Mel, and that truck and that trout. A night like tonight I’m going to go down and cast off that stream. Wish me luck.

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A Proper Front YardDon’t mistake it for your backyard

Your backyard. It’s pretty neat. There’s some lawn, mowed nicely into disciplined stripes. There’s that left corner of the lawn, the one nearest the Johnson’s garden shed. The one Johnson paints three sides of ev-ery other year. Some day he’ll paint the side that faces your lawn, but that day is not today. Besides, the garden bench that you tucked into that corner is cute. It’s cuter in the summer when those shrubs you planted three summers back block some of the shed, but it’s cute anyway. Some day you’re going to sit on that bench.

Your deck is nice, too. It’s large enough, without being so large that the patio set looks inadequate. It’s a great patio set. I liked your deck better when it was floored with cedar, but you had to go rip that up and put down the expensive planking made out of recycled tires and oil. Your neigh-bors peeked over the fence and said they liked that stuff. They heard it was good from a friend at work who put it down. They say these things but they agree with me- it looked better when it was cedar.

The little plastic pond you dug in when your wife was away last spring visiting her sick mother? That looks nice, too. It’s re-ally adorable, actually. And the small or-ange fish that you drop in from time to time- they’re really cool, too. I like them, your neighbors like them, your wife likes them. And the raccoons absolutely love them. They think you’re the best.

Your neighbors are okay. The Johnsons are nice, even if they can’t paint the back of their shed. They do it to spite you, but you can’t accept that, and you shouldn’t. The neigh-

bor on the other side, the one to the left, they don’t talk much, but they keep their lawn mowed so they don’t bother you any. The very back of your yard, that’s a bit of a problem. Some subdivision designer in the 1950s thought it was a nice idea to stagger the lawns; to mix it up. So you have two back yards meeting your one backyard, in the way that Manitoba has to contend with both North Dakota and Minnesota. It’s not ideal.

If your neighbor to the rear on the left would cut his grass once in a while, with at least some regularity, that would be better. He cuts it, or at least his son does, when the village sends him a letter and tells him to either cut it himself or the village will cut it for him at $100 per man hour. Even when he cuts it, or the times when they forcibly cut it for him, neither party weedwhips so it doesn’t really matter to you. Both outcomes are bad. You’d put the hammock in the other corner, opposite the bench, but you’re going to wait for him to sell or otherwise vacate before you do that.

This is your back yard. It’s fine. But to say that I’d trade your back yard for a Lake Geneva front yard is to state the most ob-vious. It’s in this discussion of yards that we come to a simple fact of Lake Geneva real estate. A suburban or city backyard is just that- it’s in the back of your house. Your street is in front, with your driveway and your 2 cars and your basketball hoop. There is a sidewalk to the front door, and then out of the back patio doors waits your backyard. In Lake Geneva, your backyard is where your street is and your drive-way and your two cars and your sidewalk. Once you walk through the front door

and open the patio doors and walk onto the deck or patio, this is your front yard. Welcome to the nexus of the universe.

I imagine that at some point every sum-mer, new guests are invited to Lake Geneva lakefront vacation homes. These guests are excited! They wear khaki and white, and some blue, and they put the top down on their convertible if they have one. They have been given instructions from the va-cation home owner via a text that reads, “We’ll be waiting for you in the front yard.” So, nervous khaki and white wearing guests pull into the driveway, either a long one or a short one- it doesn’t matter- and then they see no one. They see cars, two of them, but there are no friends waiting for them. So they wait. Perhaps the friends walked to town to grab some drinks. That would be nice of them. So they wait a little lon-ger. And then they send texts to ask where their hosts are at, and then there is no re-ply. So the friends put the top up on their convertible and they drive away in anger.

This could happen, but only because one of the two parties doesn’t know where a front yard is at the lake. Your suburban front yard is boring. So is your back yard. Yes, even if you put the hammock up and add the trampoline, it will be as boring as is humanly possible. Just writing about it bores me. A front yard at the lake is the ac-tion yard. It’s the lakeside lawn. It’s where house meets grass and where grass meets water. It’s where you want to be. It’s where your friends want to be. It’s where I want to be. It’s where you should be, and if you’re not going to be there this weekend we need to start talking, stat.

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N1903 Loramoor Drive

Many homes are unique. Big deal. This home isn’t just a spectacular home with each room dripping in luxury features, it’s also a shining example of Prairie Style architec-ture- perhaps the most stunning example of such style on the entire lake. This immacu-late lakefront boasts custom woodwork with too many built-ins to count, six masonry

fireplaces, stained glass transoms, lakeside veranda, and huge windows framing wide water views. The kitchen is as gourmet as gourmet ever was, with Aga and Gaggenau ranges, Sub Zero refrigeration, Bosch dish-washers, all within a custom layout that will pamper the vacationing epicurean.

The extensive cherry millwork is a running theme in the home, from the dining room to the grand main entrance to the billiard room and lakeside den. The bathrooms are exqui-site, each with unique touches that continu-ally and constantly echo the quality of the fixtures, tile work, and design. The exterior is as a fortress, with granite stone exterior and

limestone trim, a concrete barrel tile roof and maintenance free triple glazed windows made of pre-finished extruded aluminum. The one and a half acre lot is majestic, with 110’ of level frontage off of Loramoor Drive. $3,398,000


A Great Big LakeBecause small lakes are really just ponds

In the world of lakes, there are large ones and there are small ones. Some are so large they are considered great, others are ponds so small they don’t ever achieve the nam-ing rights of what they actually are: lakes. The lakes that are great are inland oceans, vast volumes of water so great that cit-ies can flush sewage into them and power plants can wash mildly radioactive water into them and no one really notices. Un-less it happens near a beach where the af-fluent gather--then people talk about it for a while and other people put up warning signs with a stick figure swimming and a circle around him with a line through his chest along the beaches. No matter, those lakes are so great that the water will change soon enough and the sewer water will mix with the nuclear water and as long as the Zebra Mussels work overtime to make the water appear clear, then things will be all right.

These greater lakes can whip up some seri-ous waves, too. They’ll pound the shoreline where little Abigail plays, and if the waves hit the beach for long enough there will be a sneaky undertow that Abby and her parents should seriously watch out for. My grand-mother almost died in an undertow off some beach in one of the Hawaiian islands, but that story also included my aunt playing the hero and saving her, and I’ve never seen

my aunt swim even once so that story that I’ve always believed seems suspicious to me now. Either way, in a great sea or a great lake, undertows are scary and serious. It might be wise to avoid places with western beaches that face the oncoming winds. In smaller lakes, there’s no worry about the water djinn sneaking up on you. But in those smaller lakes, those ponds, there’s not much nature to observe. There are turtles, sure, and bass and probably some small northern pike, but not much else. There might be loons, and some Cormorant. I saw a Cormorant in my lake a few weeks ago, and that was my first run in with that mischievous bird since the last time I filled a white pail with finger mul-let and put my son on guard to fling sand at any Cormorant who might think my hard netting work was somehow done for her greedy benefit. Small lakes might have these things, but small lakes have small waves.

Those who water ski might like the sound of that. The sound of a lake that’s really a pond, where the wind has no room to whip, and waves cannot build into all that much before they hit a shore and must retreat, regroup, and start over again. This is what these water skiers think. That a small, shal-low lake, with no giant wind and no ensu-ing giant waves to ruin their perfect run is

the way to go. To think this way is to trade the incredible power of a lake so big that it is not as dangerous as a lake so great, and to think like this is to assume that there is no fun to be had in sitting on a porch watching a dark,whipped-up sea send rollers towards your pier and your shore.

When mornings are calm, and the lake is glass polished into a mirror, this is when I like to fish. I have always said that I’d rather fish on a dead calm lake and catch nothing than fish in a wind and catch something. I don’t mean this as much as I used to, but I do still mean it. But when I’m looking for a lake, I want a lake capable of displaying a wide spectrum. I want a lake that can lay flat in the morning, so I might cast and catch nothing, and then I want that same lake to whip up in the afternoon when the storm clouds roll in. I want boats to rush for the shelter of their canopied piers, and I want rollers to build from one side un-til they reach the other and people walk-ing the shoreline--people who are familiar with oceans--suggest that the rollers are the same as those that they’ve seen on sounds or bays or open salty seas. I want the power of the lake to be undeniable, and I want to be able to watch it from nearby where I can hear what is happening and feel the power of a large, momentarily angry, lake.



Over the past 12 months, things have changed at the South Shore Club. The ame-nities are still unrivaled, the grounds impec-cable, the architecture inspiring, and the lakefrontage sweeping and eye popping, but things are different. I sold a house last spring for $3.575MM, then another sold privately for around $2.5MM, then I sold another home in August for $1.8MM. Then, this spring, an-other sale yet. This one at $3.2MM (not my buyer or seller), and at once, over a short year, the South Shore Club has indeed changed.

There are but a small handful of vacant lots remaining inside this pillared entry. These few parcels offer vacation home seeking buy-

ers the ability to build inside of this vibrant lakeside community. Enjoy the lake in a com-pletely different way, while still living exactly as any private lakefront owner would. The boats are gassed and ready, the grounds finely curried, the swimming pool as inviting as any resort pool ever could be. Jump in and enjoy the new South Shore Club. Select vacant par-cels available, ranging from $699k to $990k.

David C. Curry 262.245.9000

[email protected]


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This RoutineLife is sort of lame without one

I moderately enjoy traveling. The effort is not so fun--the TSA, the early flights, or the late ones, too, and the feeling that some-thing has been forgotten that will make the trip unpleasant, or ruined, the stress of the entire thing. But a change in scenery is oc-casionally needed and it is appreciated, and when that new scenery begins to feel a bit familiar then I think the vacation is even more fun. This is why when I find a place I like I tend to visit it again, and again. Fa-miliarity in our daily lives is what we’re trying to replace, but familiarity in a vaca-tion setting is comforting and sought after.

It’s for this reason that I like to return to Marco Island every winter, to duck out of the cold and into the warmth, if only for a short time. I enjoy the feeling I get when I drive up and over the Jolly Bridge, and find some peace knowing that I like the Publix on Col-lier but not the Publix on San Marco. I like knowing that Tiger Tail Beach is for fishing, but not for swimming, and that mullet can easily be netted in that lagoon but not really in the shallow bays on the East side of the Jolly Bridge. These are the sorts of things that familiarity can teach us, and through this fa-miliarity a process, or a routine, is established.

To buy a vacation home on a Friday and then to find your way there on a Saturday is a won-derful thing, but it is not immediately part of a routine. A vacation home purchase is emo-

tionally thrilling, but the onset of this routine can be physically draining. There is effort in-volved, and many times the vacation home of our dreams can be exhausting. The pro-cess that loads a family into a car in the 60606 and transports then across tollways and into the 53147 is not always the easiest. It can be hard work, and it can be tiring, and when the kids scream most of the way up it can be maddening. Vacationing can be difficult.

When the first Friday at the lake arrives, nothing will be as it really should be. Even though the furniture delivery truck brought new and fabulous things to your new vaca-tion home, it will not yet feel comfortable. It will not yet feel entirely like home. And even if the furniture truck did bring everything, and the closets are stocked and the refrigera-tor is, too, even then your new vacation home still won’t quite feel right. Time is the only thing that makes a vacation home feel right; the addition of memories to that new floor and a pile of rocks that your son just picked from the water that morning and left on his nightstand overnight-- that’s what is needed to make a vacation home feel like home.

The first weekend in, and the fourth week-end for that matter, is all about exploration. It’s about figuring out which grocery store will become yours, and which convenience store is closest should the milk run low be-fore anything else really does. It’s about pro-

cedure--when to wake up and when to walk to the lake. Is coffee on a pier or a deck, or is it in bed? Is breakfast bacon on the skillet or is it bakery items in a box, brought back by the one who made the earliest run to find coffee and pastries still warm enough to fog up the inside of the thin cardboard box they came in? And after breakfast, is it straight to the boat or straight to the porch, to read a maga-zine for a few minutes or to spend an hour in-side a book? Do the kids swim in the morn-ing when the water is calm and at its most clear, or do they wait, as you do, for the sun to warm them before curling their toes over the edge of that new white pier and pushing off?

The argument against sporadic vacations that find us in different locations every time we can find a few days off work is an argu-ment for familiarity. It’s an argument for routine. For every moment we spend lusting for a change, there are two moments where we just want to feel at home. For every left turn we make at an intersection we’ve never seen before, there is a right turn that takes us from our wooded drive and towards the restaurant that we know makes that omelet exactly how we like it. The routines are not easily formed, and familiarity takes time to grow, but while the rewards of feeling at home when away from home take some time to realize, the time devoted to this goal is well worth the effort.

www.genevalakefrontrealty.com 39

521 Wilmette

To prove a point to you, I was going to stand on the deck of this house and throw a ball, or a rock, or something small and round-ish towards the water. I thought that if I did this and was successful in hurling that object from that deck into that blue water, that you’d understand the issue of proximity and how it is, in fact, no issue at all to this home. Then I thought about whip-ping that rock or ball, and I thought about what would happen if I missed my target. What if I missed the lake and hit a neigh-bor’s house? Worse, what if I threw that rock with all my might and it struck someone in the head or the back or the stomach? What would everyone think of my experiment then? I decided against throwing the rock and instead chose to just take some pictures.

People and homes and small woodland creatures in the vicinity, you’re all welcome.

The pictures surrounding this copy speak much louder than these words, but there is some prose that must be written because there are features and nuanced aspects of this home that must be pointed out. But before those, before the cedar shingles and the period cor-rect siding, we must discuss this ridiculous proximity. If proximity is king, this home is impatiently waiting for its bejeweled crown.

While I didn’t throw something towards the lake this morning, the fact that I thought about it for as long as I did should tell you something. This cottage- this quintessential, fabulous cottage- is located in Cedar Point

Park, just one home off the lake. To be cer-tain, not every “one home off the lake” home is created equal. The issue with some such homes isn’t proximity as the crow flies, but proximity as a chubby person walks. We are not crows. And as such, we must walk to the lake and so it is important to note where our access points are. A home that is one home from the water is nice, but if the access is sev-en homes down and around that big, dying Elm tree, that straight line proximity is wast-ed on a forced meander. This home isn’t just close to the lake, it downright smothers it.

There are two access points here, both just several lazy steps from the cedar lakeside deck of this thoroughly rebuilt cottage. The Cedar Point access provides this owner the

choice of two piers to lounge on, to fish near, to jump from. If you develop a speak-ing relationship with some neighbor from up the lane and you wish to no longer con-tinue that new relationship, this isn’t a big deal. Just move to the other pier for a while. Proximity so amazing that it lets you pick and choose who you will and who you will not communicate with? Practically priceless.

The home has views, tons of them. Lake views, wooded views, quiet views. When in any room of this house it would be impos-sible to accept the thought that you are any-where but at the lake. The views follow you. If you see water from the kitchen and wish to no longer see it, you cannot hide from it. It will be there in the living room waiting for

you. Should you wish to escape it further, you can walk into the side den/third bed-room, with its wainscoted walls and gabled ceiling, but it will find you there too and de-mand that you pay it some attention. If you hate views of the lake, this is not your home. But if you love the lake and you love looking at it, and you love hearing it and smelling it (it smells like nothing with a hint of perfec-tion), then this is the most ideal lake home you could ever dream of. The finishes are high end and entirely brand new. The main bathroom is ensconced in marble, with mar-ble floors and marble counters and marble surrounding the jetted tub. The kitchen fea-tures marble and Viking, and polished nickel this and white painted that. It’s large enough

to make you feel more handsome or more beautiful, thinner, taller. The living room and kitchen both open onto the rambling lakeside deck, with three distinct seating or entertaining areas. For a concise home, this place punches far above its weight limit.

This home is as a brand new home, entirely and thoroughly finished right down to the Impatiens in the flower beds, and it is ready to sell. For a buyer seeking redemption in the form of a summer spent lakeside, I can likely close this home in as little as 15 days. If you like the thought of spending most of June and then all of July and August and hopefully September near the water envel-oped in stylish luxury, this home will gladly fulfill your summery aim. $599,900


Fly Fishing Geneva Lake? Fly fishing Geneva Lake

If Mark Twain deemed golf to be a good walk spoiled, I can only imagine what he’d think about fly fishing. There are easy ways to fish. Really all you need is a stick and some string, but this is a method that re-lies on supreme stupidity of the fish. Bear Grylls fashions hooks out of pop cans and ties those to a giant parachute chord and then he catches fish. These are stupid fish. This is not the easiest way to fish, either. If you can find a fishing pole and some fish-ing line and a reasonable hook looped with a giant worm, this is the easy way. This is the way that the meat fishermen fish in the Abbey Harbor, those unsporting fisher-men who yank spawning fish off of their beds, but this is not the way that I fish.

I can’t quite say why I find fly fishing to be so enticing. It is not easy, nor is it par-ticularly effective. That isn’t exactly true, as there is no easier way to entice a brown trout out from beneath an undercut stream bank than to tumble a tied nymph past it. Correction- it would be easier with a hook and some worms, and I suppose that’s the point. Fly fishing isn’t easy and it isn’t al-ways effective, but it is always a challenge that combines a bit of art with the distinct possibility of lodging an airborne hook into your own ear. The gear is oppres-sively expensive, the flies easily lost, the tangles irritatingly curse-worthy. Even so.

I’ve been spending a bit of time casting a five weight rod not up a small creek in the Drift-

less but off the bow of my white boat into Geneva Lake. I cruise the shallows, casting again and again. False casts for a while un-til the line is out enough and then a double haul, some better than others, into the re-lease. Sometimes the cast is perfect, others not, and still others aborted mid cast when the fly catches the flag pole or antenna of the boat. The fly is not a nymph but a streamer, and on a sunny Sunday morning a week ago I found smallmouth willing to eat that little white and yellow fly. The shoreline south and west of Uhlein’s creek isn’t particularly remarkable from a fishing standpoint, but when a roaming school of smallmouth appeared in the shallow water under my boat, there were false casts and then the re-lease, and with a few slow trips a fish had found my presentation believable enough.

That fish, a slender but legal bass, won’t be entered into the record books. No one would find it particularly impressive. But on that warm morning with the water lying still and my son looking on, it was everything I had hoped it would be. I spent the winter dreaming about a morning like that. About the way the sun looked when it rose over Cedar Point and the way the water stirred around 8 am and went lazy and flat again by 9. About the varied shades of green that would pop along the shore, first the willows and then others, some bright, others dull, but all shades of green that artists have tried in vain to capture. The sun warming my back and my fly in the air, the just released

bass swimming slowly back into the depths; this was the morning I had waited all those petulant winter months for.

Between the last fishing morning of 2011 and the first fishing morning of 2012, there were plenty of other fishing mornings. There was fishing in oceans and in streams, and fishing with a surround of cold snow and others still standing on baked sand. These other mornings were fine, but they were nothing like that Sunday from March. Yes, I argued with my son some about the positioning of the boat. He has a hard time keeping it parallel to the shore so that I can cast, but just writing that provides me ad-monishment enough. At eight years old he’s a perfect fisherman, able to set hooks with skill that most 40 year olds lack, or lost.

That morning, with my fly aloft, my son caught more fish than I did. He was fish-ing with minnows that we had netted in the shallow water east of the creek earlier in the morning, the same minnows that winter weary bass cannot turn down. The morn-ing wore on, and when the fishing slowed, we did, too. Cruising back into the Abbey Harbor, there were other fishermen around. Those with bobbers and giant clumps of worms, likely catching more fish that we did. They might have been more productive than we were, but I doubt they felt as lucky as we did to spend that morning on that beautiful big lake.

Summer homes 4 city people final 1sthalf

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