Conflict never contained itself just to our bedroom, though. Virtually every year, by the end of the week, everyone was pissed at someone else, for one reason or another. You put fifteen people in a small house in the August heat, with a cooler of alcohol per adult, there’s bound to be some drama. After all, once the sun sets in the middle of nowhere, there isn’t much to do besides drink. This is how reality television is made, after all. At the worst of it, in the midst of an after-dinner board game sometime in 2000, some innocuous disagreement over the rules led my grandmother to throw her arms in the air and shout, “That’s it! We’re out of here!” And she promptly made my grandfather pack all their belongings in the trunk and drive back to Chicago in the middle of the night, never to return to the cottage again.

To complete the idyllic vacation ambience, the cottage plumbing was as archaic as the structure itself, and to stave off the literal shit show that fifteen people taking daily showers and bowel movements could wreak on the system, we enforced a strict “if it’s yellow, let it mellow” policy in regards to toilet flushing, giving the hallways an added air of dank stench. But, inevitably, the pumps would give way, and the grass in the back of the house would start bubbling up with thick sewage. To make it all worse, my uncle’s parents—the cottage owners—installed a toilet in the corner of the large room we used as a pantry, which, on the one hand, alleviated stress on the otherwise lone toilet upstairs, but, on the other hand, added a layer of filth to our snacks, which we kept on a table on the other side of the room, even after the toilet was consecrated. It was all, to say the very least, a less than ideal living arrangement, to be sardined into a decaying house, floating on a river of shit, delirious for lack of sleep.

Of course, the real draw of Michigan—what they talked about in those horrible commercials—was not to be confined indoors, but to experience the bounty of nature, or some bullshit like that. The cottage was simply the backdrop, a place to sleep (or not) so you’d be rested the next morning for another day spent entirely outdoors, away from television, the Internet, and the refrigerator.