Of course, this should be obvious, but if a lake is surrounded by overgrown, almost impassable vegetation—so dense that only a gravel road suffices as an acceptable throughway—maybe it shouldn’t be colonized by tourists. There was another house along the gravel road, inhabited by lake-town natives, who I assumed had been driven insane by years spent gestating in relative obscurity. Whenever we’d drive past, without fail there was always a child in one of the windows brandishing a rifle.

Welcome to Disneyland.

The cottage was a relic of the 1970s, a modest-sized structure with all the trappings you’d expect of an old lake house: musty carpet, wood-paneled walls full of kitschy wooden ducks, and wrought-iron birds alongside framed photos of aunts and uncles and cousins holding up fish caught twenty years before. The house had the perpetual whiff of dampness, the smell of decades of wet feet walking on wooden floors, sunblock and sweat dripped onto carpet, the accumulation of dust and dirt and cobwebs settled permanently in those nine off-summer months when a vacation home goes unoccupied. It would have been a comforting smell, if not for the year someone found a dead squirrel in the closet, in the center of an old, rolled-up rug. I hesitate to think how long it was there, whether the fresh country air we had been breathing year after year was actually just airborne squirrel decay.

At least fifteen of my family members would go to the cottage at once—my grandparents, my mother and her three sisters, their husbands, all five of my cousins and me, plus the dogs and the turtle and anything else that managed to fit inside the trunk of the car. Each family unit would cram into one of the four bedrooms, which means I’d get stuck on a deflated air mattress on the floor beside my parents’ bed, my brother on a cot at the end of the bed, an arrangement that virtually guaranteed all of us would go an entire week without sleep. Every night, I’d fall asleep, and in a matter of minutes, my brother would whip a pillow forcefully at my face to stop me from snoring. (My oversized tonsils made any attempts to curb my snoring nearly impossible.) Pissed, I’d groggily whip the pillow back, but given my homosexual aim, a lamp would fall over, the dog would start barking, my dad would start grumbling, my mom would start shouting, and before long, the entire house would be listening to us screaming at one another to go to sleep.