The Lake Job

Now THIs is a STORy all about HOW- I got to sit on my ass next to a beautiful lake for months at a time, looking at boats and spitting sunflower seeds at my feet… and got paid to do it. That’s right, with real money. Take that, millenials. You’ll never see money in your lives and I got it simply by kicking my sandals off and bronzin’ my bod. Suckers.

Anyway, yeah so in high school, I worked at a lake in the summers checking out boats and jet skis as they went in and came out of Lake Minnetonka. Located about 30 minutes west of Minneapolis, Lake Minnetonka is the crown jewel of the Twin Cities lakes chain and absolutely no expense is spared to protect its beauty and innocence. It’s a bit of a super-lake, if you will, a collection of smaller lakes connected by man and Voltron-ed into one big body of water. And the lake is indeed huge, spanning like ten miles across and featuring strange pocks of thinly connected land that give Minnetonka more than 100 miles of shoreline. Every metro area kid has been sunburned on its beaches, every teen’s secretly gotten drunk on a trip to Big Island and even Prince wants you to purify yourself in its waters. Of course, rich people mostly populate the lake’s bays and shores these days with their yachts and million dollar homes but goddamn if that water don’t sparkle just right on a hot summer night.

But like I said, no expense spared at Lake Minnetonka and when it became clear to everyone that our precious water was under attack, it was no surprise that I found myself drinking Mountain Dew and playing Animal Crossing in the line of duty. You see, I signed up to be a Watercraft Inspector and my job was to check each boat going in and out of the lake for pesky, rotten, no-good zebra mussels. These goddamn goobers were an invasive species, I was told, and they were to receive NO mercy if I saw one. Roughly the size of a dime, zebra mussels would adhere to boats, rocks and pipes and eat all the dang biobits and algae in the lake. “But wait!” you yell, stupidly, “I like clear water!!!!!!!” OH YEAH? Do you also like native species of algae eaters dying off or accidentally cutting your foot on a mussel-studded rock while trying to impress a girl at Excelsior Bay? …Didn’t think so.

a boat propellor choked with zebra mussels

So there I was, armed with inspector forms, proper boat cleaning tips and a lawn chair, ready to take on any and all invasive species that even looked at me funny. We inspectors worked chiefly on the weekends in six-hour shifts: 6am-noon and noon-6pm. Now, getting up at 5:30 am on a Saturday is no teen’s idea of a good summer but here’s a little secret: the hell of getting up early is rendered completely palatable when you’re spending an early morning out by your lonesome, watching the sun rise over a tranquil lake. It’s remarkable. The solitude of the morning is broken only by croaking frogs and jumping fish and the blue-black of the lakewater is set aflame by a brilliant sun. We rarely had customers during that 6am hour, fishermen sometimes, and it was always the best hour of the day. If you’re ever feeling like garbage, take it from me and go stare at a body of water at dawn… it’s insanely restorative.

Every now and then, a boat would come in, we’d record type, license plate, ID number, any previous lakes it had been in, check the hull for bugs and, seeing none, send it on its way. It was repetitive work but in your off time, you get to do whatever the hell you want on that dock, be it looking for ~cool rocks~ on the shoreline or shifting your lawn chair to stay in the shade or slowly choking down gas station coffee after deciding Mountain Dew AMP was probably only for babies these days. It was barely a job! Hell, some people I know and WILL NOT NAME — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — would sign up for shifts and then not even go. Oh, they’d still get paid because here’s the best part: supervision was basically non-existent! We technically had a boss? who would come collect forms? every month or so? But on a given shift, you’d be the only Law Man out there and if you decided to hit up Arby’s for a lil lunch break and leave your post for a bit, well, no one would be the wiser. The boaters certainly didn’t want you there, hassling them with questions and delaying their sick wakeboard boat wakes to go wakeboard on. Once, a guy demanded I erase his license plate number from my form after he saw me eyeing his shit and goddamnit, I did because I ain’t dying for no summer job. Even one as choice as this! (His boat was clean though folks, no worries there.)

“But Kristian!” you cry, tears streaming down your face, “What about all the infected boats you missed while eating Arby’s New Ocean Grist & Cheese Sandwich™????”

My friend, that was the best goddamn part of all. In my two summers on the lake, I only ever saw ONE zebra mussel on a boat I inspected. And it was on my last day!!!! (Mussels need more than a few hours to latch onto a hull so daily boaters were never a huge worry.) I sent that jet ski to the power cleaners, threw my clipboard in the bay and sped off.

Job well done.