The Lake



Laurel Lake is in the pinelands of South Jersey, in Cumberland County, New Jersey, close to Millville, and beside the scenic Maurice River. The lake is man-made, as are all lakes in Southern New Jersey, usually created by damming for the purpose of running mills back in the early days. Originally, it was a summer resort area, but now, and when I lived there, it was more of a low-income housing area, summer cottages adapted for year round use by attaching trailers and adding small wood-frame rooms, garages, sheds and other simple structures. Commercial Township also allows trailers to be placed on lots that are not designated mobile-home parks. There are nice houses on the north side of the lake, but we lived in a green and white trailer on Dandelion Road near Doris Drive, on the southern, poorer side of  Laurel Lake. Still, there were cottages and trailers that served as summer retreats, which when vacant were frequently burglarized. I was guilty of this myself, breaking into places, stealing liquor, or a stereo, and I once scored a bottle of valium. 


But most people, mainly poor whites, lived here year round, in rusting trailers on sandy wooded lots, often with yards full of junk: broken toys and washing machines, old cars with shattered windshields, decorated with faded, sun-bleached lawn ornaments, like plastic ducks and flamingos, concrete deer and black-face porters holding lamps. Side streets were often orangish brown dirt which would become muddy after a rain, churned up by the wheels of an old green wood-paneled station wagon, backfiring as it went by.



My friends and I used to hang out at Plummer's Store on Battle Lane, an all purpose general store that stocked everything from nails, to plumbing supplies, to groceries. They also had a flat top and you could order things like hamburgers and grilled cheese sandwiches, prepared by Mrs. Plummer, in an old flowered apron. On the well worn wood floor stood a pool table, and we would play pool, and get a hot dog or a soda, and pass the hours. Or we'd hang in some secluded vacant lot, smoking whatever shitty weed we could score, or drink whatever liquor we could get. Or we'd swim in the lakes cool water, feeling the weeds on the bottom, with our feet. I remember one night, hanging out with Ron and Debbie on one of the docks, high on acid and laying on our backs, enraptured by the meteors trailing across the sky, the small waves gently lapping below.

The main drug dealer was this guy named Louie, who lived in a beat up old white trailer. He had a pot-belly and dark curly hair, and I think he was Puerto Rican. He lived with this very large white women, and I think they had a couple of kids. Louie's head rested crookedly on his shoulders, the result of breaking his neck in a motorcycle accident, I was told. He mainly dealt pot, but I think he dealt meth as well, which was pretty big in South Jersey around that time. You had to know him, be "in", if you were gonna have an audience with him to score, so you usually got someone else to hook you up. I got to party in his timely lit, wood paneled trailer one night. I smoked a lot of pot, and we were drinking white lighting, which I almost had trouble keeping down on a couple swallows. After, I walked down Spring Garden Road with Mark, who was a drummer in a cover band. We stumbled wildly from one side of the wide road to the other, laughing hysterically at our condition, even though my head was pounding painfully.


One night the power went out at our trailer, and most of the Lake. A car going well over a hundred miles an hour, didn't make the curve at the Laurel Lake Dam on Buckshutem Road, taking out a utility pool, crashing through the guard rail and ending up at the bottom of the lake. We walked down to the scene of the accident, where there were a number of emergency vehicles, with blue and red lights flashing, reflecting off the pavement and the water. It was eerie, thinking of that car beneath the nights dark water, with it's occupants trapped. A body was brought up, and quickly wrapped, smelling of muck and that last defecation before death. A chill went through me. This is death? A limp, blanket wrapped body dripping water and covered in algae and lake weed and smelling of shit. I flash back to a scene I witnessed when I was about eight years old, when we were driving back from a spring vacation in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina: A tractor-trailer on the side of the interstate. Beside it was a Volkswagon Beetle, whose roof had been torn off by the trailer somehow. On the hood of the VW was the upper part of a body of a man who had been truncated below the rib cage. There was blood everywhere, the color of cherry pie filling. It was a brief moment, but that image is forever etched in my mind, like seeing that body pulled out of the lake.




Location: Laurel Lake, Commercial Township, NJ, USA

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