Before They Go Back…
It’s August down here in Fayette County, and that means families are scrambling to get their young ones ready to trade swim trunks for notebooks. From the littles who just want to skip stones across the cove all day to the high schoolers learning how to back a boat trailer down the ramp without a symphony of honks, everyone is trying to squeeze just a little more summer out of the calendar before the family road tripper officially morphs into the family school bus.
Lake Fayette is just about the finest place on earth for families at any age, but right now, it’s ground zero for endof- summer rites of passage. Take young Miss Chloe Vacek, who just celebrated her 12th birthday right before stepping up to the seventh grade. Middle school is a peculiar sort of purgatory, somewhere between childhood and full-blown adolescence. A girl is too old to play with dolls, but not quite interested in fussing over makeup and the latest fashion rags. It is, however, the absolute sweet spot for a gal-pal slumber party in a bunkhouse cabin here at Oak Thicket Park.
It came as no surprise to anyone that the local dads let out a collective sigh of sweet relief when they dropped their pre-teen daughters off with Mrs. Vacek at Cabin 106 for the weekend. They knew they were trading three days of teenage sighing for wide-open fresh air.
And what a weekend it turned out to be. Those girls packed more living into forty- eight hours than a school of bass during a shad hatch. They scorched marshmallows at the campfire ring outside their cabin until they looked like charcoal briquettes, rode bicycles until their legs felt like rubber along the shaded hike-and-bike trail, and completed the notoriously tricky Lake Fayette scavenger hunt courtesy of the eagle-eyed camphost, Sarah. They gorged themselves on frozen treats from the gatehouse, stayed up entirely too late watching a B-rate monster movie, and frankly, should have set a world record for recording at least seventy-nine separate and distinct ways that pre-teen girls can giggle, laugh, snort, and guffaw.
Yet somewhere between the midnight sugar rush and the sudden, uncharacteristic quiet of endless energy spent, Chloe and her three closest friends—who often act more like sisters than schoolyard chums had that moment.
You know the one. It’s that exact instant where four friends in the golden dawn of their youth sit dangling their toes off the edge of the fishing pier, watching the ripples settle. They aren’t talking much; they’re just looking back at the years they’ve shared on these shores and squinting a bit at the uncertain road of the year ahead. They know things are bound to shift. One of them is bound to discover boys first, or someone might move away when a parent takes a job back in Houston, or Austin, or beyond.
Out there in the golden hour, when the August sunset casts a rich, buttery glow across the still, dark waters of Lake Fayette, friendships quietly settle deep and grow into a lifelong sisterhood. It’s the kind of magic that makes parents stand back and watch their babies grow up right before their eyes.
Summer fades, the school bells ring, and the fish keep swimming. But down here by the water, memories are made, marked, and cherished.
Good luck to all our young campers as they return to the classroom this fall, and a double- portion of grace to all the parents watching those fleeting moments turn into milestones.
Gillbert Ives has been casting lines and sharpening pencils in these parts since before the valley was a lake, documenting the life of the Fayette County shoreline one ripple at a time.