Frautschi Point:
A Nature Story

"She hoped the not-allowed word ('stupid') would sink down to the bottom of the pond and etch its way into the crabs hard shells. She couldn't see them, but she knew they were down there, scuttling along the bottom of the pond." – Kathi Appelt, from Keeper




1.

Every time they came down to Frautschi Point Trace always wondered how far she would have to walk out into the shallows before it got too deep to walk anymore and she would have to leap in. She pictured this over and over again because she had always been afraid of water, especially anything that she could see that looked like it was moving, that was the worst of it. "Go ahead and jump in yourself," she said, somewhat slyly, to her little brother Sam who didn't much like cold water either but would do anything on a quick dare. From the shore down near the point at the beach, Lake Mendota looked like something out of a Caribbean painting -- the blue surface of the lake was flat and blue, barely any breeze, and sailboats still smoothly glided across the horizon point white as clean sheets, but it was October on a sunday and the air was beginning to cool. Mendota was mostly deep and was never particularly warm. Sam was in the shore water ankle deep. "Come look at this," he said, pointing down at a band of weeds and muck reaching in at the sand. Trace plunged over slowly, the rocks small and gritty at the bottom. "I see lake grass and foam. It looks like something you might eat!" she said, pointing down to it. It was true. Sam had a peculiar habit of trying to eat nature. When they walked here sometimes after school, dad always kept one eye on the trail and another on the quick hands of Sam, who might pick off a berry of a buckthorn or a random leaf. "Not that one, buddy, not that one." Trace's dad was not an expert in edible nature, so the general rules were to look, let live, move on. "But the berry's look like little cherries," Sam might counter. He once brought a small bag of picked lily pads back home and slipped two of them into water boiling for pasta on the stove. When Trace warned against eating the 'seaweed' at this ankles, she meant it.
   "It's a bee," he pointed, flipping over some of the floating grass. "It's all tangled up and upside down. Let's save it!"