Mooring Fever

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

[The article below ran 40 years ago in the magazine section of one of our two (at the time) St. Louis daily newspapers. If you can get past the presumption of a 27-year-old writing a memoir, you might enjoy this piece. It will give you some idea, I hope, of why The Mooring still has such a hold on me and dozens of others.
Here, and throughout the blog, a number of lead characters have been assigned aliases to protect their privacy. However, Robert and Charlotte Horner are the real deal. You can't impose an AKA on a legend.]

St. Louis: June 22, 1975

For This St. Louisan, It’s Mooring Fever Time

by Carol S. (Kennedy) Porter

 

My happy family

We were driving to Rolla recently when the Interstate Fantasy came over me again. In this fantasy, I am not headed for Rolla or Columbia or Kirksville (Mo). Instead, I am grinding along Interstate 196 in a Greyhound bus, on the last leg of my journey to Holland, Mich.

When I arrive, in this fantasy, I will be met by my aunt, uncle and cousins, who have invited me to share their vacation at The Mooring, a Holland resort they first discovered several years back.

I am excited. We’re almost there. I smooth the straight skirt of my yellow seersucker traveling suit, check my Cleopatra eyeliner and put on a dab of white lipstick. The year is 1965 and I am 17.

It was a feverish, transitional time to be that age. Slowly awakening from the sweet, sappy, post-’50s torpor of the Fleetwoods, I had turned my attention to the new message of the Beatles. To hold my hand...was that really all they wanted? For me, July 1965 was the curious, poised moment in a demented decade right before nuances yielded to strident demand. A sense of expectancy hung over us all.

My expectations concerning The Mooring were that it would be good fun. But it wasn’t just good--it was transforming. The right time, the right place, the right people converged that summer to bestow on me the kind of magical experience usually restricted to heroines of teenage fiction. It was a delightful paradox, for in those two weeks I learned a lot about growing up and a little about staying 17 forever.

The Wee Scott--our Mooring cottage

The Mooring is an ideal environment for such a metamorphosis. To call it a “resort” is to somehow miscast it, for it defies the glossy image evoked by that term. The Mooring is 40 acres of lakefront property: woods, lawns, random gardens. It is nine cottages scattered across the lawn: wonderful, tacky, turn-of-the-century shingled cottages with bathtubs on legs and slamming screen doors.


The Mooring is sun and shade, low humidity, sweatshirts and campfires at night. It is dancing barefoot across grass so long and lush you can comb it with your toes. The Mooring is toddlers discovering the taste of sand pies, and kids fishing off the dock, while their parents play tennis on a shaded and unabashedly ramshackle concrete court. But the primary attraction is sailing--with freedom to run down to the beach and take out one of the owner’s small boats anytime you choose.

Laissez-faire best describes The Mooring philosophy, an atmosphere cultivated by Bob and Charlotte Horner, who started the place in 1940. The Horners were a colorful couple who endowed their “resort” with a good deal of its intangible charm. Horner himself was an enigma: a blunt, randy people collector/misanthrope. He had been an economics professor until he proved too progressive for Holland’s rock-ribbed Hope College. Running The Mooring suited his eclectic personality much better.
Charlotte Horner played the alter ego...a quiet yet steely foil for her volatile husband. Since Horner’s death in 1970, she has run the place by herself, remaining at 67 the Renaissance woman she’s always been: crack sailor, expert cook, canny businessperson and mother confessor to all troubled teenagers who ever crossed her doorstep.

Both the Horners were jazz buffs and often during that summer of '65, right around happy hour, they would put some Dixieland on the loudspeaker and watch the whole sunburned crowd truck to The New Orleans Feet-Warmers, while pork steaks sizzled on barbecue grills and our better sailors joshed the ones who had dumped their boats that day.

A state of blissful vacation lunacy prevailed and I joined right in. My cousin Luke had brought his ukulele; soon the two of us had perfected a duet of “Ragtime Cowboy Joe.” Uncle Ernie joined in with either his pseudo basso profundo or his air trombone, depending on the mood of the day. Luke and his brother Matt introduced me to sailing. I was captivated by the glorious sunburst sensation of heeling along at a heart-stopping tilt, the sheet tugging in my left hand and the tiller straining at my right, as water cascaded over the bow and lake-sparkle dazzled my eyes.


For this St. Louisan, It's Mooring Fever Time (cont'd

Porpoise sailboats on the Mooring beach

The setting begged for a summer romance and Mac Parker filled the bill very nicely. His raunchy wit was irrepressible. Though I never forgot I was a proper young lady, he plied my primness with sunset canoe rides, make-out sessions on our own secluded postage-stamp of a private beach, and an all-day sail into Lake Michigan. When we beached the boat that day, he ran my drenched jeans and shirt up the mast to dry, grinning wickedly all the while. Even though I was still acceptably dressed in my proper one-piece bathing suit, I felt very much a woman of the world. It was delicious.

And it was incredibly difficult to leave. I wept the last night of our vacation, comforted only by the prospect of seeing Mac again the next year. I did, just for a day, and we both knew the electricity had turned off. You can’t go home again.

But perhaps you can, in another sense, for The Mooring has never lost its appeal. Since that first summer, I have enjoyed many vacations there with my aunt, uncle and cousins, and later, my younger sister. My husband is a strong Mooring convert. For all of us, the place has a mysterious, compelling quality; it holds the memory of countless shared good times and the anticipation of many more. It is the warm spot where my psyche lives even in the dead of a St. Louis February, leading readily to such diversions as the Interstate Fantasy.

At long last, it’s almost time to pack up my swimsuit and sailing hat for a tenth anniversary pilgrimage. I am perpetually restless in a way that only a few of the people closest to me understand. I have only to say, “I’ve got Mooring Fever.” They know exactly what I mean.