At the very instant that Mike McMahon sat in the Record-Herald office, daydreaming of Kirsten sunning herself in a bikini, the young lady was actually laying in the sun, wearing rather less than Mike imagined; since he had yet to uncover the nudist nature of the West Turtle Lake Club.

For the record, all she was wearing was a pair of sunglasses, a thin chain necklace, and a contented smile.

Carrie had introduced her to the West Turtle Lake Club two summers before, shortly after Kirsten had come to work at the Record-Herald. Carrie knew, of course, the story of Henry Toivo, and her heart went out to the younger woman. Carrie had come so close to having the same experience …

In the two years that Carrie had known her, Kirsten had tried to put Henry’s loss behind her, but she hadn’t been very successful; Carrie suspected that her subconscious refused to give up hope at all, and it was the main reason she had not been able to even start a serious relationship since. It was as if her head said, “Go ahead and do it,” but when she tried, her heart said, “Wait for him.”

It had given the unhappy young lady an unfortunate reputation for being something of a tease.

Carrie also suspected that her friendship with the Evachevskis somehow represented a sort of a last link to Henry, what with Gil using his old friendships to extend the search for him. Kirsten had once even confided that the casual nudity of the West Turtle Lake Club somehow made her feel closer to her lost Henry, and the night he had picked her naked, steaming body up and thrown her in the river.

Carrie knew that Kirsten needed to have her butt kicked and brought up to reality, but she didn’t have the heart to do it herself. There was no reason that the girl couldn’t have a serious relationship. She would be the better for it; perhaps she could stop living in the past. It was something that Carrie had realized for a year or more, but today wasn’t the time to bring it up, she thought as she looked out of the kitchen window at her friend, lying out on the lawn, then said the hell with her housework and her hung-over husband, grabbed a towel, and went out to spread out on the lawn beside Kirsten.

“How did your date with Hjalmer go last night?” Carrie asked as she settled herself down.

“He never showed up,” Kirsten said. “It wasn’t really a date, anyway, but I thought I could meet him after work. I wound up going down to the Albany River Lounge with Mike.”

“Mike McMahon? Our Mike? That must have been thrilling.”

“Well, it was better than going home alone,” Kirsten admitted, “and the dinner was good. He really is kind of a nice guy. I think it’s just taking him a while to get adjusted.”

“Going to date him again?” Carrie asked.

“I don’t know,” Kirsten said. “I just might. It was kind of enjoyable, just talking with him. He doesn’t know anybody up here, really, and I guess he was just glad to talk to me. I mean, he didn’t try out his moves, or anything.”

“He’s thought about it,” Carrie said. “Have you ever noticed him watching you?”

“Well, you know, I do kind of like to have guys look at me,” Kirsten said. It was nothing that Carrie didn’t already know; probably part of the reason that the club appealed to Kirsten was that she could be an exhibitionist in a safe environment.

“You do get his attention,” she said. “I mean, it’s not like you’ve been putting on a show for him, but he sees you.”

Kirsten turned her head to look at her friend. “You make it sound like I ought to bring him out here so he could get the whole show.”

Carrie laughed at that. “Well, you could if you wanted to, but I don’t think he’s quite ready for that.”

Both of the girls giggled at the thought. “God, he would curl up and die of embarrassment,” Kirsten said. “Maybe I ought to do it. It would really wreck his mind.”

“Probably give him the wrong idea,” Carrie conceded. “But he’s so uptight, maybe he needs it.”

“I better not do it,” Kirsten concluded. “But thinking about it is fun.”

“You,” Carrie accused, “have a nasty, rotten, dirty mind.”

“Hey,” a voice said from behind the two. “Nasty, rotten, dirty minds aren’t allowed here.”

The two women rolled over, and saw Carrie’s father standing there, a bag of golf clubs thrown over his shoulder. “Oh, Hi, Mr. Matson,” Kirsten said.

“What brings you in from the golf course, Dad?” Carrie asked.

“Just thought I’d better bring your clubs back,” Garth replied. “Frank borrowed them last night, but he was kind of in a daze when he left, and I guess he kind of forgot them.”

“Frank? Out here? On a nice evening?” Carrie said, amazed. “What got into him?”

“Oh, he came out to talk business and stayed to play a round of golf. You didn’t hear about that? It’s been the talk of the club all morning.”

“Haven’t talked to a soul except Kirsten here since I got out here,” Carrie admitted. “What happened?”

“Last night, your brother, using the shittiest shot I’ve ever seen, aced number four. First time anyone’s done that since Reverend Ashtenfelter, back in ’71.”

“Aced number four? With my clubs?”

Garth had to tell the girls the whole story, right down to the pissed-off duck angrily and swiftly leaving the scene. “Absolutely the sheer luckiest shot I’ve ever seen,” Carrie’s father concluded. “He couldn’t hit a bull in the butt with a bass fiddle after that. Of course, he couldn’t do it before, either. I think he ended nine holes with an 87, or something, but I don’t think he was counting. We got him back to Commons and broke out the champagne afterward. I think we got some clothes on him before he took off for town. Things got a little hazy, there.”

“That’s not too healthy, Dad,” Carrie admonished.

“So what? It’s not every day that someone aces four,” her father replied.

Carrie changed the subject. “We got a notice yesterday, or maybe it was the day before, that Barb is getting married again. That’s what, her seventh? I’ve lost count.”

“Yeah, I think her seventh,” her father replied.

“You know this Burleson guy?”

“Is that his name?” Garth responded. “I got a note from her that said she was getting married again, but she didn’t tell me anything about the guy.”

“Probably another creep, like the others,” Carrie opined.

“Probably,” her father said, resigned to the inevitable. He didn’t expect much better for his eldest daughter. “You know, not wanting to take anything away from you, but I sure wish she hadn’t turned Gil down, years ago. He’d have been good for her.”

“Well, for my sake, I’m just as glad she did,” Carrie said. “She would have left him, just like all the others.”

“She sure has screwed up her life,” her father said. “I’ve often been sorry about that. I have to feel like I’m at least partly to blame.”

“Her mother was more to blame,” Carrie accused.

“You’re right,” Garth said. “When it came to Barbara, I pretty much went along with her mother. Maybe I should have been tougher with her. I was tougher with Frank, and things worked out pretty much OK with him. If he didn’t have his mother yelling in his ear all the time, even today, he wouldn’t be so uptight all the time.”

“So is anything interesting going on out here today?” Carrie asked, not wanting to pursue that sensitive subject any further; it had been hashed out again and again over the years, as long as she could remember.

“Not particularly,” her father said. “Another big game in the volleyball playoff this afternoon. Me, I’m going to go get on the tractor and mow on the golf course for a couple hours, then this afternoon, Brent and I are going to go out and see if we can get around the course without losing our balls.”

Kirsten bit her lip, trying to keep from laughing at the old West Turtle Lake Club joke.

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, August 13, 1975

BURLESON, VANCE GIVE VOWS

San Francisco, CA – Barbara Matson Vance became the bride of Eugene Walker Burleson in a private ceremony in Reno, Nevada, on Saturday, July 25.

The bride is the daughter of Garth Matson and Donna Clark, of Spearfish Lake, and is employed as a real estate salesperson in Sausalito, California. The groom, the son of Harold and Pauline Burleson of Eureka, California, is operator of Dunn-Burleson VW-Honda, of San Francisco.

The couple will make their home in Sausalito.

The West Turtle Lake Club was still pretty primitive in the summer of 1948. The core of the large, inspiring clubhouse that in later years would come to be called “The Commons” had just been completed the year before, which gave Ursula Mandenberg a rather enviable senior project; there weren’t many architectural undergraduates who could claim the design and completion of such a building for their senior thesis.

Of course, as far as she was concerned, there could be no other possible place for her wedding to Brent Clark, which, of course, caused problems all around.

By this time, Clark could have cared less whether his stepmother attended the wedding, but he did think that his father ought to be there, no matter what his wife thought.

At the same time, Colonel Matson thought that his oldest daughter, Barbara, then fourteen, ought to at least be given the option of attending the wedding of his oldest friend and her stepbrother, whether her mother wanted her to or not.

It was not a surprise issue; it had simmered all winter.

As a result of the custody agreement that Brent Clark had helped the Colonel negotiate in the early spring of 1946, Frank and Barbara spent their weeks with their father, but half the weekends and all but two weeks of the summer with their mother. If he had been left to himself, Frank at that age would still have been young enough to take the West Turtle Lake Club as a more or less natural thing, but Barbara, as a young teenager, was sensitive about it, and her mother’s constant complaining about it to anyone who would listen made her even more sensitive.

Barbara was aware of the giggles around the school, many of them behind her back and directed at her, were about the club. In those days the people of the town had little understanding of the club; few realized that the members of the club were actually pretty straight, with the exception of their avocation, which was only a side effect of their interest in sunshine and healthy outdoor activities.

As a result of this lack of understanding, everyone in town knew about how her father’s marriage to Helga had come about, of course, and his association with the club gave Barbara an “easy” reputation that was totally undeserved; she’d only been out to the club two or three times, and she was grateful that her father and Helga never made the issue of it that her mother did.

It was part of the reason that she had taken up with Gil Evachevski at a young age; even in eighth grade, Gil was big and tough for his size. Boys seeking easy action knew that they would have to answer to Gil, who mashed a few faces over the years defending Barbara’s reputation; he had learned early on that Barbara’s reputation around school was totally undeserved.

Early on, before Brent Clark had taken up with the West Turtle Lake Club and Ursula Mandenberg, Donna Clark had hoped that he would marry some fine, upstanding woman from town. That would help cement a type of family relationship of the sort she had enjoyed before the war, but as the summer of 1946 passed, she had come to understand that this was not to be. In fact, Brent had grown quite distant from her, and rather distant from his father, after he had started the construction company and removed himself from the day-to-day activities of the plywood plant. Despite her complaints to both Brent and Wayne, it became clear that he was planning to marry the gorgeous young nudist as soon as she got out of college.

From Donna’s viewpoint, the final straw came when the announcement was made that the Clark-Mandenberg wedding would be held at the West Turtle Lake Club, and that clothing would be optional.

Wild horses could not have dragged her to the wedding; and, if she had anything to say about it, Wayne would stay away, too.

It has been stated that Wayne Clark was no fool, except perhaps where Donna was concerned, but there was no way he was going to be kept away from the wedding of his only son, who he had raised alone after the death in childbirth of his mother.

Being stuck square in the middle, the elder Clark was at a loss for what to do. In desperation, he turned to Colonel Matson for a suggestion, any suggestion at all.

“I told Ursula that it was going to cause problems,” Matson said as the two met in a booth in the Spearfish Lake Bar and Grill one afternoon, “but she wouldn’t listen to me. Typical woman, just as hard-headed as Donna.”

“Yeah, but Garth, that leaves me on a spot,” Clark complained. “What the hell am I going to do? You know Donna as well as I do. If I make an issue out of this with her, she’ll leave me, like she left you.”

“Only one thing you can do,” the Colonel replied. “Lie.”

“Hell, she’d leave me anyway.”

“You might be better off,” Garth said, “but that’s not for me to say. Look, here’s what you could do: Brent knows you’re in a hole on this, so get him off to the side and tell him you’ll be there, but that you’re going to let Donna think that you’re not until the last minute. He’ll understand. Then, at the last minute, you tell Donna that you just couldn’t help yourself, and go before she has a chance to get up a killing rage.”

“She’ll kill me when I get back.”

“She won’t,” the Colonel said. “Remember, when you’re talking weddings, you’re talking women’s country. She’ll be touched that you defied her on account of your son’s wedding.”

Clark thought about it for a moment. “It might work.”

Matson nodded. “At least you’re gonna be free of four months of her bitching at you about it. She’ll probably bitch at you afterwards, anyway, but it buys you four months of peace.”

“I guess I’ll have to do it,” Clark said. “I can’t think of anything better, and I don’t want to miss Brent’s wedding. Can I ask a favor of you?”

“What?”

“Just to be on the safe side, I think I’d better hide all the ammunition in the house beforehand. Can I stash it at your house?”

“I was going to suggest it,” Matson agreed. “I’ve still got to settle the issue of whether Barbie goes to the wedding or not, and if Barbie goes, her mother could get really upset. I’m perfectly willing to leave it up to the kid, but I’d just as soon her mother doesn’t get involved in the decision.”

“Why not handle it the same way?” Clark suggested. “Tell Barbara it’s her decision to make. I think she’s got sense enough to tell her mother that she’s not planning to go. At least she’s got sense enough to not tell her mother that she is planning to go, because of all the yelling she’d have to listen to from now until then.” The Colonel nodded, and Wayne went on, “At the last minute, I’ll offer her the chance to go out there with me. Maybe she could take that boyfriend of hers with her, if his dad doesn’t mind.”

“I don’t think Dan would,” the Colonel said. “He was in Battery D and at my wedding.”

Clark nodded and said, “Yeah, I guess I knew that, now that you mention it.”

The wedding of Brent Clark and Ursula Mandenberg took place on a warm June day, with white cumulus clouds dotting a blue summer sky, and the sun lighting the porch of the peeled-log community building at the West Turtle Lake Club, as well as the face of the radiant bride and groom. In rare deference to the sensibilities of some of those present, including Wayne Clark and the young teenagers, Barbara Matson and Gil Evachevski, Garth Matson was dressed in a suit and tie, as were many of the other club regulars, especially those from Spearfish Lake. However, Helga Matson, the Mandenbergs, and the bridal couple adhered to the traditions of the West Turtle Lake Club.

The joy of the occasion did not keep Wayne Clark from looking about the premises from time to time, as if he expected a police raid or armed attack of some sort following Donna’s return home from the meeting of the Spearfish Lake Women’s Club and finding the note he had left for her.

No one commented about the heavy cardboard box that Wayne Clark had left sitting on the porch of Colonel Matson’s cottage when he showed up for the wedding.

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, July 12, 1948

SPEARFISH LAKE NOTES

by Virginia Meyers
Record-Herald Social Editor

*   *   *

Mr. and Mrs. Brent Clark returned Friday from their honeymoon in the east. The newlyweds said that they had considered going to the south of France, but that the time they had available did not allow for such a major journey, so they limited themselves to sightseeing in New York, New Jersey, and Maryland, and visiting some of the places where Mrs. Clark had grown up. The Clarks will make their home on Point Drive in Spearfish Lake.

*   *   *

Mrs. Wayne Clark returned home last Thursday from a short stay in Camden General Hospital, and thanks her friends for the cards and letters she received during her hospitalization.

*   *   *

Mrs. Garth Matson was the featured speaker at the weekly meeting of the Spearfish Lake Woman’s club last Wednesday. She spoke on the topic of “A healthy body makes for a healthy mind.” The ladies of the club said it was an interesting presentation.

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