THE DEVIL IN THE LAKE

"If anyone asks, we've been asleep all afternoon." My oldest brother half-whispered at me. Then in a flash, he and my second oldest brother disappeared into their bedroom. I noticed there was a slight hint of burning something or another in the air. The statement by itself was enough to make me wonder, but giving that it was only 5:00 in the afternoon and my brothers rarely took afternoon naps, I was getting very curious as to what was going on. Suddenly I heard a firetruck wailing in the distance. Slowly it grew louder and louder until it became obvious that it could only be going to one place. All the pieces fell together in one fleeting second. "Devil's Lake is on fire!" I raced to the screen door window and peered out at the people running down Bent Drive to Devil's Lake. Great plumes of smoke billowed out over the string of houses that rimmed the swamp that would eventually lead to the lake itself. The swamp was all cattails, and when summer would get dry, all it would take is a dropped match to set it off. And it would go up in a fury.

Devil's Lake was.....I mean is....located in the heart of the north end of Flint, Michigan and can be seen by driving down Pierson Road. It's now a shadow of it's former self. The swamps have been filled in along with the bogs. But there was a time when it was my backyard where I built forts and hunted frogs with my BB gun. Most any summer afternoon you could find me down by "The Drain" with my Zebco 33 fishing for bluegills and bullheads. We weren't really allowed to be down to the lake but since the "Soaps" were on from from noon till 3:00 it was easy to slip away.

Devil's Lake is what the people of Flint call the lake, but don't look for it on any maps. It's real name is Flint Park Lake, named after the Park that was once located on the east side of the lake. It was a nice little park, they tell me. It had a beach on the lake and a Coney Island style park complete with a Roller Coaster. But the Devil lurked down below it. It's form was that of an underground river that was eating up the soft ground on the bottom of the lake until one day it finally broke through. From then on it flowed in one side and out the other. That created buoyancy on one side, but on the other side it created suction and people who had fallen in said you could feel the Devil pulling you down.

The first sign of trouble for the Park was that people started drowning at the beach. Soon rumors of the "Devil in the Lake" started spreading and shortly thereafter, the Park was shut down.

Little by little the river pulled down pete (loose black organic dirt) from the one end of the lake, until trees stared to fall in and a strange bog formed. The roots of cattails and small trees formed enough of a mat to let vegetation grow even though the dirt beneath it was gone. If you weren't careful, you could fall through up to your armpits. Pallets were thrown down to reach the end where all the best fishing was. Looking back.....damn we were crazy. During the course of my youth I saw several kids pulled out of that lake. Each time we would huddle as close to the divers from the rescue squads as we could. We were fascinated by their stories of what it was like down there. Giant carp and catfish, stolen cars, water thick with black pete that seems to just hang in the water. Once one of them was nearly sucked in, and now they were all tied together with rope. Finally, the crowd would become quite and they would float the body up with balloons as we all would stare, horrified. The sound of a mother crying for her child is something that is hard to forget and it always came right as they lifted the body away from The Devil. I could easily live the rest of my life without ever hearing it again.

It seems that would have been enough to keep us away, but in the cattails we had a network of paths carved out, several cool lean-to forts, stashed BB guns, and a constant war going on with the kids on the other side of the lake. To just leave would be to surrender everything, especially our BB guns. None of us were even supposed to have them after Curt got shot in the eye. And a good stash fort, well defended, was our best hope to keep them. Our main fort was the coolest part. It had a roof built of old shed steel, and sticks shoved into the ground for walls. it had secret stash spots for our BB guns, cigarettes, and our prize possession, a playboy book we had successfully stolen from the drug store. In fact, it was so cool, it was it's downfall. My brothers and their friends discovered it and took to skipping school there and hanging out.

Apparently, my brother's friend, Dan, decided to start a "small" fire. My brothers said they were in the fort when they heard Dan start yelling, "IT'S OUT OF CONTROL! IT'S OUT OF CONTROL! They said they stepped out to find Dan waving his coat at the fire screaming RUN! RUN!

It was a pretty cool fire actually. No one got hurt and it burned mostly stuff the people around there wanted filled in anyway. But I remember that next day, sneaking out to look at the burnt remnants of our fort. I picked up a piece of the BB guns we weren't supposed to have and angrily threw it into the blacked forest. The next summer they began filling in the swamp for good. I guess somebody finally had enough of living next to a death trap, a mini-Vietnam, and a dumping ground. I remember them plowing over the fields where the park was and pushing the chunks of concrete into the bogs. Times change. Every once in a while I still drive by Devil's Lake and I wonder if the Devil still lives there. If he still grabs a hold of little boys stupid enough to wade on his slippery rocks. This story doesn't have a moral or really even a solid point. It's just that every once in a while I love to reminisce, to sit back and imagine myself a young boy again, standing on the edge of a pallet, catching my fiftieth bluegill of the day and defying the Devil that lives in the Lake. H.C.