God, I love Lake Martin. I’ll take a rented or borrowed boat out all alone and anchor it just so I can listen to the water hit itself. If there’s no anchor, I’ll cut the boat off on one end of some deep water and let the wind and waves carry me to the other end before I move back to where I started. If it gets too hot, and it does, the water is fine.

I could sit on the water and watch the sun set every night. It would never get old, and I’d never complain about the colors. I could stay until it’s pitch black and everyone else has already gone home, so I can ride back after midnight when the water is as smooth as glass, and the only ripples are the ones left behind.

I guess I could love any lake, but this one hits different. Maybe because she and I are well acquainted. Enough of her water has shot up my nose during skiing attempts, and I have babied her forever. We get along. And I have gone through all her rites of passage.

I jumped off Chimney Rock when I was a teenager. It hurt. I did it so I could say I have, which is a terrible reason to do anything, but as I rack my mind for a better reason, I can’t find one. I’ll never do it again, and I don’t recommend it, but I’ve done it.

My complaints about the lake are not the popular ones. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. “It’s too busy.” You just have to know the good spots, but I digress. There is no town surrounding the lake that I want to live in, so if someone forced me to choose between there and here, I’d pick here. Even if there is a house in the mountains with a writing room calling my name, I can’t justify that yet, so Bluff Park wins.

There really isn’t a particular thing I can associate with why I’d choose it. I know things I like about it. I know I like the shade and the sidewalks. The breezes and the sunsets. The night lullabies that the frogs and crickets sing. The light shows that the fireflies put on. Some of the food and most of the people. My proximity to The Pig. Park Avenue between Chapel and Farley. The bats and the hawks. The echoes the acorns make when they ricochet off metal roofs in the dead of night. The rain. The fog. The view.

I’m sure there are many places where I could get those things. But the air is better here. Purer and easier to breathe. And ya know… for a man whose ultimate ambition is to live freely and to be at peace, I can’t really ask for anything else.