My eyelids grow heavy as I lie in my sleeping bag atop my grandparent’s houseboat, watching the sky darken and stars appear. The rule is that I cannot fall asleep until I witness a shooting star. I see the blink of an airplane, then the steady course of a satellite, and, finally, the quick flash of a shooting star. I close my eyes and enter slumber at the sound of lapping waves and Grandpa Mac snoring in the cabin below.

My grandparents had bought the makeshift houseboat in 1969. It consisted of a small silver trailer with a rounded back end set upon pontoons. It had an ample front deck, just the right size for a large family to eat hamburgers and play pinochle. A few weeks after their purchase, the FBI came calling. The former owner had committed fraud, and the boat was to be seized. Luckily, Grandpa had the title.

We would cruise around Lake Oroville in Northern California, where temperatures reach well over one hundred degrees in the summer, perfect for swimming and skiing. I had my routine: stand in the sun and get hot, jump in the lake, climb out, grab a Coke, and bask in the sun on my Betty Boop towel. When the last water drop had evaporated from my skin, I would repeat the process.

Lake Oroville is a manmade reservoir, filled in the late 1960s. Old roads run below the surface to an extinct destination. Rock walls marking Gold Rush miner trails line the hillsides. Somewhere in the depths with the sunfish and trout the remnants of an old railroad lies dormant.

When my grandparents grew too old to keep up Mac’s Shack, my mother inherited it and moved it to Washington’s Lake Roosevelt. Each weekend my stepdad would be fixing something new: the steering, the refrigerator, railings. There was always work to be done on the redubbed, Mac’s Revenge. None of this stopped us from having fun, from kicking back in a lawn chair and listening to ski boats speeding by.

As my siblings and I married and had children, we brought our spouses and children to the lake. Spending time on the boat was a requirement for acceptance into the fold. There were always little feet, dogs, chips, cookies, sunburns, pinochle, laughter, and falling stars.