“There’s always a price,” my little sister chirped from the passenger seat of my SUV. Sweat was dripping down her face and soaking her body, which was covered in sand in every conceivable and inconceivable area. She looked at me laughing the sort of laugh you laugh when you want to cry and then laughed harder when she realized that however bad the sweaty, sandblasted look was on her, it was worse on me.

It was a Wednesday afternoon in late July, the temperature reading on the dash said 104 and the decision the two of us made to play hooky from the rest of our responsibilities backfired in the way that was funny and sort of harmless, but also has you questioning why you didn’t pick the suburbs.

“City girls would never!” our friend said as she was lugging a cooler, swim bag, a floatie we couldn’t deflate, a heavy denim blanket and two lawn chairs (one she couldn’t figure out how to collapse)  a quarter of a mile through rocks and sand, a trail of reeds and black biting flies in the middle of a wind storm that was blasting our bodies with sand in 100 + temps  with 1000% humidity, because a storm was coming, of course, but not the kind that comes with rain to cool you off.

The thing is, once we get to the end of July everyone in the upper Midwest starts panicking a bit about summer being over, visualizing the seventeen months of winter that are ahead of us. And because we were in the middle of a relentless heat wave I suggested that instead of shirking our responsibilities to hit the public pool, we should try for the beach on Lake Sakakawea thirty miles north of town because we hadn’t been to the big lake yet this year and you have to go to the big lake at least once or it’s not a summer. So, I packed a swim bag and a big cooler full of drinks, some snacks and sandwiches, towels, beach chairs, floaties, a worthless air pump and our puppy and swung by to grab my sister and her daughters, who all packed the same things (minus the puppy). And along the way a friend called to see if we wanted to join her at the pool and somehow we convinced her that lugging all of the stuff I just mentioned, plus five girls, a half mile from the car to the beach in 104 degrees was a better idea. She said she’d meet us there in a jiff.

Now in case you’re reading this and you’re picturing a lake situation where you drive right into a nice paved parking lot facing a groomed public beach with those little barricade buoys marking out a safe swim zone complete with restrooms, garbage cans and a shower, this is not the case here. This beach, in our childhood, used to be a two track trail off a gravel road with a flat spot on the prairie for parking and a skinny, sandy walking trail through the weeds that leads down to the water, which, depending on how high the lake is that summer, can be quite a hike. These days they’ve made it a little more accessible, with a nice road and a groomed parking area, but it’s still pretty rustic and that’s why we love it.  In my memory though, the hike wasn’t so cumbersome, but that’s probably because I’m reaching back from when I was a teenager, ripping off my clothes and running for the shore after my shift at the clothing store in town. Now, we are moms with four young girls between us, two who had to poop immediately upon arrival in that little makeshift parking lot. “No worries,” I said, “I forgot ice. We will just head to the marina store and take care of it.” So back we went, about three miles, to the marina store only to find that the marina store is closed on Wednesdays and so are the bathrooms. Knowing we could live without ice, I remembered the vault toilets that existed in the campground and headed there for what was the world’s stinky-est sauna experience.  With that task done, we were on our way to cool off, no thanks to the luke-warm beverages in the cooler I discovered was way too heavy to drag to the beach anyway. And also no thanks to the crappy portable air compressor that we packed that couldn’t inflate a balloon in forty minutes, let alone four big floaties. I grabbed the puppy, a pool ring and the inflatable banana the girls couldn’t live without, along with all the other essentials, but not the cooler, and we finally headed toward the beach to plop our lawn chairs in the water and watch the girls swim while we sipped on the cold beverages our friend brought in her reasonably-sized cooler which she remembered to stock with ice. And it was fun. The water was cool. The views were pretty. The puppy dug a hole under our umbrella and sat in the shade. The girls ran up and down the beach collecting rocks and sticks to float. I spent twenty minutes blowing up the pool ring and my sister spent fifteen blowing up the banana. I spit sunflower seeds into the sand between dips in the water and we gabbed, enjoying being girls on the beach for a good hour and a half, until…

The wind started to pick up, blowing the little umbrella where the puppy sat across the shore. I got up to chase it (and the puppy), looked down the beach and saw a wall of sand heading right for us. Oh. No. I turned to watch the girls chasing the run-away banana floatie deeper into the lake. “Leave it!!!!” I yelled as I grabbed the pup. “Come back to shore!” My little sister went in after them, carrying the half-inflated pool ring like her life depended on it. Our friend started frantically gathering all the things we lugged down to the shore while the sand whipped at our squinty eyes and stung our sweaty skin. Our daughters tried to help, following behind us dragging whatever item their little bodies could carry, trying not to blow away while shlepping through the sand and swatting the black flies, all of us puffing and sweating and whining up the hill and to the car. My sister, still clinging to that pool ring (trying to compensate for the lost banana I guess,) arrived at the car behind me and declared that while I survived two bouts of cancer, if she died carrying a cooler, chair, kid and pool ring through that sand storm in 104 degrees it would have been an embarrassing obituary. She was close. And then we proceeded to frantically throw every single thing, plus the soggy, itchy kids, puppy, and the forty-five pounds of sand that came with it in the back of my SUV and peeled out of the there so fast that I didn’t realize the back hatch was wide open until a mile or two down the gravel road.

“Next time we’ll just go to the pool,” we all laughed, only half meaning it, because a country girl would never…