Summer on
Lloyd’s Bayou

Avery Ferin

The month of June rolls out of the bayou like a tongue and licks the town of Spring Lake all over, leaving a damp film atop every surface. 2,390 people, that's all it takes to warrant referring to Spring Lake as a “community,” and each one of them will pseudo-respectfully remind you of it should you ever question the waterfront’s city validity. Nestled directly beside Grand Haven — a West Michigan summer reverie and tourist flytrap notorious for its expansive public beach. Postcards branded with interpretations of the phallic pier and flagrant red lighthouse that beetles into the brumal Lake Michigan water are available for purchase at every 7/11 on the westside of the state. Spring Lake straddles the runoff referred to as Lloyd’s Bayou. It’s a name worthy of an explanation, surely, but not even the 3rd generation families who’ve settled on the bayou since the Great Depression can tell you who Lloyd was or how he gained an entire body of water named after him. 

My mother’s sister and her family have lived in this town for as long as I’ve been alive, and I devoted my finest summers accidentally inhaling nose-fulls of freshwater and digging splinters out from the bridge of my foot from their unpolished dock. I carried my young cousins, Louise and Eleanor, on my back and dove under the water’s surface, legs pumping through the water like a frog and cheeks distended with breath. The heat masked the sky and cast a haze onto the town, like we were constantly gazing through smudged eyeglasses. But the sun held its head above the fog and hovered until the last possible second before the clouds would slink in, forcing the day beneath the night. I would perch on the dock with my legs crossed, swatting at mosquitoes fat with my blood, and pointing at the glimpses of fireflies as the houses peppering the bayou went dark one by one. 

Years later, I would see these protracted summers as a sort of idyllic limbo in which callousness had not yet perturbed me, nor did I feel the inclination to run and protect my expanding body from onlookers. It was childhood sincerity, a candidness that most outgrow in due course. We hang onto the safety of raw youth intuitively until we round that adventitious corner into maturity. 

The summer I turned 13, my aunt advised us to stay away from the bayou. An accident occurred on the water, and the Coast Guard had the perimeter swathed in yellow caution tape for at least another month. My mother withheld the details of the incident from us, but my morbid curiosity drove me to our desktop computer and typed the words “Lloyd’s Bayou Accident” into the search bar. 

A group of teenagers, only a few years older than I, had taken their parents’ speedboat out into the water in the wee hours of the morning, just before the sky had turned violet. In a drunken effort to retrieve the eldest child who had fallen off his skis and into the inky water that melded with the surrounding sky, the driver falsely undershot his target and collided with the boy; the propeller tangled with his skin and hair, leaving him more fragmented than whole. I never told my parents that I knew why we wouldn’t be returning to the bayou that summer, though I would smell the blood and gasoline each time I dove into its depths and came up for air thereafter. 

My family spent a weekend in Grand Haven that August instead — the time of year when the city celebrates its yearly Coast Guard Festival. It’s a spectacle that draws in thousands of people, mainly college students, the likes of which I had only seen on the 7:00 news. We rented out a one-bedroom flat above an old-fashioned candy store on the main drag, only a few blocks down from the parking lot where construction workers erected a rickety Ferris wheel and tilt-a-whirl in a matter of hours. Even with the windows latched and the AC whirring on full-blast, it was impossible to dodge the sickly sweet aroma of funnel cakes and dip-fried batter. It permeated through the walls of every building within a 4 mile radius. 

The coast was awash with vacationing families and sunburned sightseers, and I stepped on a smoldering cigarette some ignorant tourist had stuck upright in the sand that first day. I hobbled on my tip-toes to the lake and attempted to flush the dirt from the burn. The edges of the circular pock frilled backwards like the lid of a soup can. I swore and spat and, for a moment, cursed the name of the dead boy who kept my family from the bayou and forced us to the public beach that year. I walked with a definite limp, exaggerated by the tacky, syrupy sidewalk that trapped my flip-flops with each step for the rest of the week.

We returned to Spring Lake the following summer, and would continue to do so until I moved to college a few years later. At 15, I spent the vast majority of my afternoons curled on a rotting Adirondack chair under the willow tree my uncle was so unabashedly proud of, with a beach towel draped over my razor-burned thighs despite the sweltering heat. As the oldest child in the family, including the cousins, my body was the first to show symptoms of pubescence. I watched with fervent jealousy as Louise and Eleanor performed handstands in the water while I wasted afternoons coiled in the shade. Their suntanned legs jutted into the sky in analogous lines that vanished if I held my pinky finger up to block them out. Despite reminding myself that I was older, that soon a summer would come when they too looked like me, I just couldn’t revoke my resentment from the matter. 

At dinnertime one evening, the four of us sat shoulder-to-shoulder on the edge of the dock with our freshly grilled hamburgers on paper plates and watermelon juice trails staining our chins and wrists. Louise was still in her red and white stringed bikini from that afternoon, and I watched as a glob of ketchup squeezed through the crevice of her sandwich and plopped onto her toned stomach. I transfixed my eyes on the red blotch and the way it bubbled on her skin — the only contour on an otherwise flattened surface. She laughed and bent over, contorting her torso so she could lick the dab off of her belly. I realized I wasn’t hungry anymore and tossed the remnants of my hamburger bun to the flock of geese floating nearby. 

The last time I visited the bayou was during the summer of 2019, mere weeks before I started my senior year of college. On that last day, about an hour before my family would pack ourselves into my dad’s station wagon to head home, it rained harder than I had ever seen. It looked like television static; only slivers and flashes of the outside world were distinguishable from beyond the windows. Still, the temperature persisted at a balmy 90 degrees, and the droplets returned to steam almost instantly after colliding the pavement. I sat idly on the futon in the basement guestroom, and before I understood what I was doing, I had slipped the bottom half of my two-piece swimsuit on, twisted my hair into a French knot and discretely slipped out the back slider door. The dock had turned a rich brown from the downpour, and my footprints disappeared in its moisture. I tiptoed precariously to the end, turning back periodically to check if a cousin or a sibling or, god forbid, a parent was trailing me. 

Besieged by a roaring white noise and concealed by a sheet of showers, I lunged headfirst into the bayou and allowed the tepid water to shroud my body. From beneath the surface, the only sound I could make out was a muffled rumbling from above. I opened my eyes, a trick I’d mastered after years of Marco-polo and breaststroke races, and peered around me. The water, though fresh, remained a dense olive green from the natural algae and sediment. I glanced down and couldn’t see the bottom of my feet, unable to tell if I was floating in one spot or gradually sinking lower and lower. Finally, I touched down on the spongy floor, curled my feet into the sediment; its cool, dough-like sensation slithered between my toes. The tension in my lungs warned me at once that I couldn’t remain submerged forever, causing my body to launch itself involuntarily upwards. I tore through the thin membrane and into the open air, gasping and coughing in fits. 

Once I made it safely back to the dock and heaved myself onto its rubbery surface, I settled onto my back and stared into the rain as it pelted my skin. It occurred to me then that I could lie right there forever and never fully dry off just as long as the storm persisted. So, rather than running back toward the security of stale air and itchy cotton towels, I let my feet dangle off the edge and into the bayou, toes skimming the surface, as I inhaled the perfume of muck and weeds while the water on my body refused to dry. 

There is a sort of sadness that circumnavigates my chest whenever I think about Spring Lake and the collection of summers I spent wrapped in its coastal mystique. It was the place where I acted the most primal, where I allowed the impulses of youth to take over, to turn my curiosity into action. But with age comes awareness, and I understand now that Spring Lake never belonged to me at all. The bayou was never my home. Each visit required a return to a monochrome life that tasted of insecurity, passiveness, and dilution. And so the idea of returning to the bayou, of walking along that rickety dock once more, bears a sort of grief. I fear it would only prod at the tender area in my stomach — the one that is vacant and longing to be full again.

Still, the willow tree stands like a soldier in the backyard and I heard there is now a plaque memorializing that young boy whose life was lost in those impenetrable waters. I think about him often and how he, too, would have turned 24 this year. A swell of guilt radiates down my spine whenever I think about how I swam in that same water for years afterwards, like I’d been digging up a grave with each stroke. 

There are afternoons when I’m driving west down I-96 and gusts of lake water fumes fill the cabin of my car and I have to combat the urge to take the next exit and drive until my tires meet sand. Sometimes my palms ache with desire, but I dig my foot into the gas pedal, grip the wheel tighter, and strangle the thirst in my stomach until it withers, until I can’t even remember where the feeling came from in the first place.