Once More to the Lake

“Once More to the Lake” is a narrative nonfiction essay written by E. B. White. The essay was originally published in Harper’s Magazine in 1941. White (1899-1985) was an American author best known for his children’s novels, including Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, as well as his contribution as co-author to The Elements of Style, a seminal English-language writing guide. “Once More to the Lake” recounts White’s experience of revisiting, as an adult, a lakefront camp in Maine that his family frequented when he was a child.

White begins by describing his family’s first visit to the lake in 1904, when he was five. Despite a few hiccups, “the vacation was a success and from then on none of [White’s family] ever thought there was any place in the world like that lake” (1). Although his family’s annual visits to the lake are well in the past, White finds himself yearning to go back and plans a vacation with his son. On his way to the lake, White wonders “how time would have marred” the campsite and whether “tarred road would have found it out” (1). He finds that the paved road does, indeed, extend nearly all the way to the lake but is delighted to find that the campsite is more or less the same as he remembers.

Settling into the vacation, White is struck by a strange sensation: “I began to sustain the illusion that [my son] was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father” (2). This notion persists as the two go fishing for bass, and White feels convinced “that everything was as it always had been, that the years were a mirage and there had been no years” (2). After catching a couple of bass, the two go for a swim, and White takes note of the other camp-goers, who look to him exactly the same as the camp-goers he remembers from his youth. Eventually, White and his son go up to a farmhouse where they are served dinner by young women who appear to be “the same country girls” (3) who have always worked at the farmhouse.

After reflecting on the virtues of summer vacation and the “jollity and peace and goodness” (3) that characterize his memories of the camp, White pinpoints the appearance of outboard motorboats as the quality that most spoils the illusion of a return to his youth. He contrasts these engines with the one-cylinder boat engines that fascinated him as a child. Seeing his son’s desire to master the outboard motor, White recalls the tricks one could perform with a one-cylinder motor if they “got really close to it spiritually” (4).

Overall, White enjoys this vacation with his son and, although there have been some noticeable changes around the camp, he is able to maintain the illusion that he has assumed the place of his father and returned to his childhood. He ends the piece by describing the onset of a thunderstorm that appeared over the lake one afternoon. As the storm dissipates, the camp-goers rush out of their cabins to resume their swimming while “perpetuating the deathless joke about how they were getting simply drenched” (5). His son decides to join the other campers, and White watches him change into his swim trunks. As his son finishes changing, White abruptly ends the piece with the following line: “As he buckled the swollen belt suddenly my groin felt the chill of death” (5)