We Jumped in The Lake

We Jumped in The Lake
Originally uploaded by lorenzodom

August 10, 2007, Atlanta, GA:

Life is Good (at Lake Lanier)

We ate, we drank, we jumped in.

It was an absolutely splendid evening and all night long we were reminded that “Life is good.”

At six, the four of us took Harry’s boat to the water’s edge of Lake Lanier and ate at Big Creek Tavern. None of us had ever eaten crawdads (crayfish) before, and so we tried some as appetizers, and loved them.

Delilah, our waitress was quite charming from the start. Jimmy seemed to think that she had a thing for me and kept mentioning it for the rest of the evening. "Lorenzo, she couldn't keep her eyes off of you."

Thereafter, he also jokingly said a few times, “We should just tie Lorenzo to the bow of the boat,” suggesting that I could serve as bait for the babes somehow. Being inebriated I was tempted to tell him that I had that dreaded ailment—ABD, but I knew it was in my best interest to keep my mouth shut, doing my best not to argue with him, if only to let him inflate my ego undeservedly just a little more.

After dinner we all got back in the boat and traveled for about fifteen minutes until we reached a beautiful little cove, the perfect swimming hole within Georgia’s largest manmade swimming hole.

Lake (Sidney) Lanier was created by the completion of Buford Dam on the Chattahoochee River in 1956. It encompasses 38,000 acres or 153.8km² of water, and normally 692 miles or 1114km of shoreline. A "full summer pool" consists of 1071.0 feet of water above mean sea level (AMSL). Named for the poet Sidney Lanier, it was built by and continues to be operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

According to the boat’s depth meter, the cove we were in was about 35 feet deep. The shore that surrounded us consisted of this incredibly deep red clay, which eventually I discovered I could lay in and lie still, to experience a renewed sense of serenity.

The silt was so soft on one edge of the cove where the water undulated lithely to and fro, that my body sunk into about six inches of what felt and looked like crimson silk. I was immediately smitten by the experience, putting my head back into the water, so that all I could hear was my heartbeat and an occasional breath or two.

It wasn’t until I start hearing faint yelling about fifteen minutes laters, the muffled shouts sounding almost as if I were in a dream, “Lorenzo! Lorenzo!” that I stirred myself up and sat up to see that my colleagues were calling me because they thought that perhaps I had drowned.

Thus, I doggy paddled back to the clamor of their conversation and found myself back in the middle of gruff voices and high-blood pressure once again.

To escape, I decided to try and take some self-portraits of me jumping off the boat, if only for fun, if only to experiment a little and to see what would happen, if only to escape the ennui of a perfectly calm evening.

My colleagues thought I was crazy trying to take photos of myself jumping in. And although I never really got a good shot, what I got was good enough for me.

In fact, I tend to believe that often the mere allusion to something leaves a far stronger impression, because it pulls them in with intrigue, and the opportunity to use one’s imagination and maybe even solve a mystery.

Thus, when Jimmy asked me later on in the evening if waitresses usually were that friendly with me, I merely smiled and deftly diverted the conversation by commenting that it was Sasha who had all the charm, regaling the time we dined amongst the gods and he sweet-talked the Russian girl who was serving us.

The diversion was a conscious strategy on my part, because often less is more, ignorance is bliss, and every astute man wants his friends to believe that he has more prowess than he really has. All aspiring men, princes and paupers alike, from modern times to the dark ages before Machiavelli, have known to employ this power of illusion, so that ultimately women either love or lust for them, and their fellow men—fear or revere them.

“...Men in general judge more by their eyes than their hands; for everyone can see but few can feel. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few perceive what you are, and those few do not dare to contradict the opinion of the many...”
—Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince—

Either way, last night reminded us how wonderful life can be when you simply slow down and enjoy it.

It’s no coincidence that Captain Harry’s boat is named—Life is Good.