Bear Swamp

About seven miles up a windy, bumpy road from the abandoned stone home I wrote about yesterday was small community where my sister lived for a couple years. This community didn’t exist back when the stone house was occupied but established several years later. All the maps call it Bear Swamp and it was a marsh area until someone built a dam and created probably what was a sixty acre lake. There were some cottages built there; probably fewer than ten in total. Anytime someone called it Bear Swamp a resident would quickly correct you and make you call it Bear Lake.

My sister lived there because her husband was a police officer and the community felt safe having someone living there that could defend the community. They let them live there for free. My brother-in-law, being a man of vast frugality jumped at the opportunity even though one ever went up there. One needed keys and combination to several gates to get up there in the first place.

There was no electricity up there and I thought it to be quite the novelty to light the gas lamps on the walls any time I stayed with them. We had a battery radio and one of the main activities was to play Monopoly with some of the neighbors. Sometimes we played at my sister’s cabin, sometimes at the neighbors’ cabin.

There was a dock on the lake and I’d often go in their boat fishing for perch. The lake was great for swimming and even a swimmer with little confidence could swim to a large rock out cropping across the narrow outlet bay by the dam. I recall once swimming there and someone shouting from the dock “COPPER HEAD!” I looked and there was a copper head snake coming in my direction. I had never swum as fast before or since. The snake wasn’t after me; it was just swimming in the same direction which was the shortest path across the bay. I guess it was weary of the ruckus that was being made on the dock above where it lived and was going for the quieter side of the lake.

The lake has since been bought by the State, and those with homes there were allowed to live out their lives, but were unable to transfer their deeds to anyone else.

It’s funny how one thing leads to another. Heather sent me a photo of an abandoned place with got me thinking about abandoned places and then to an abandoned stone structure and finally to a community of lake cottages where I have many fond memories.

A post script on this post was that I was going to use a Google Earth photo of the lake, but it appears the State has taken out the dam and returned the lake to a swamp. I instead used a photo by Mary Ann McNeany that resembles what I remember, but there were no madrona trees at Bear Swamp.