I spent a lot of my prime jackass years on Lake Mead. This was during the late ’70s, early ’80s, as I flailed out of my teens in a long spasm of hormonally influenced dicey judgment. Back then, of course, the lake was just a lake, a basic feature of the landscape optimized for big, dumb fun, rather than the alarming example of ecological anxiety and perilous resource management it’s become. If it had a bathtub ring at the time — as it’s had periodically as far back as the mid-1960s — I didn’t clock it. It was just where we went to enjoy boating, camping, picnicking.
Also, really illegal fireworks. I’m talking rockets the size of donkey legs, at least in my memory, procured from ads in Soldier of Fortune, a magazine for armchair mercenaries.
I should mention here that I was hanging out with some guys who were six or eight years older than me. While no more emotionally developed than I was, they had fun-enabling things I didn’t, like credit cards and boats.
So picture five or six people zooming to a quiet spot far across Lake Mead in the night. Dumb-fun fact: If you fire rockets into the lake rather than over it, they won’t snuff out. They’ll explode down there: massive, mesmerizing flashes of silent light.
One memorable July 4 evening found us floating beside a spire of rock in a distant cove. Among other combustibles, I had a brightly colored box containing 16 smallish rockets — you light one fuse, and they fire in sequence. I clambered a few feet up the rock, where I set the box on a small ledge and lit it. Dumb-fun fact: When rockets shoot from one side of a rocket box, its weight distribution shifts. The box suddenly tumbled toward me, shooting fiery missiles within inches of my fear-widened eyes and heaving chest. Only the luck of the stupid spared me, everyone else, and the boat itself from injury. Naturally, that didn’t stop us the next year, or the next. And in case you’re wondering, absolutely no drugs or alcohol were involved.
I won’t tell you the pipe bomb story. But rest assured, there is one.
Not all of our pursuits were so destructive. Some were just typical youthful peacocking. I couldn’t ski, but I could fall really well, so, like lots of other people, we cliff-jumped, though less often from the crowded shoreline spots than from the highest points we could boat to. Dumb-fun fact: Plunge from high enough, and your flipflops might tear into pieces when you hit the water.
We towed one other on inner tubes behind a speedboat, too. Now, when the driver whips into a turn, and the torque snaps the tube-rider outside the wake, and you’re audibly sizzling across the water — that’s a helluva jolt. But if you fall off at that speed, lake water is only slightly more forgiving than land. You cartwheel across the surface like a broken rag doll. More than once I tumbled to a stop, then had to find my swimsuit.
Yes, looking back, so much of this was just dumb. I mean, fireworks into the lake?! Why didn’t I think twice about this behavior? Apart from youthful recklessness, the answer is this: Back then we could still take the lake’s durability for granted. It was just the lake. Dumb-fun fact.
My mangy adolescent testosterone finally waned in my mid-20s, and I haven’t inflicted any harmful idiocy on the lake since. I’m happy to report that my environmental awareness has caught up to the hard realities about the lake’s precarious future. But I’d be lying if I said I don’t occasionally relive that sizzle, and smile.
