We had one place that we frequented often—the Morse Reservoir Park and Beach. Only fishermen frequented the park at night—casting from top of the seawall, waiting for bass or catfish to grab onto their bait or lures in the calm evening water. During daytime hours, the park played host to softball games and basketball scrimmages, Frisbee golf matches and BBQs under the wooden pavilions. In the daytime, water-skiers and wakeboards alike jostle the human-made lake, along with powerboats and slower traveling pontoons, out for the sheer enjoyment of traveling on water. But the motorboats are only able travel at a wake speed after dusk (merely by law, of course). Evening was a sort of rest for the oil-soaked water company reserve, overused by middle and upper class suburbanites during the sunlight hours.

The still evening water of Noblesville’s Morse Lake attracted us to the park frequently—there were fire pits for public use, and pavilions with park benches inviting us from the confines of a sprawling suburban town in the mid-west, where movie theaters and Wal-Mart provided extensive weekend entertainment due to a lack of social activities for the youth of the community. The entire town seemed to envelope itself by dusk on a Friday evening, housing all activity except for cars driving in the streets and blue TV glows emanating from house windows.

At eighteen, we couldn't drink many places without either getting in trouble with someone’s parents or arrested. “What about the police?” was a question that had yet to come up and wouldn’t until it was too late. My group of friends often assembled at the park, pulling lawn chairs from our trunks and setting them up in front of a pavilion and near the seawall, overlooking the still water lit by the houses that line the reservoir—some quite large ones stood along the shoreline, as well as several very nice, but more moderately-sized ones. Sometimes we would build a fire to sit around and talk about things important only to seniors in high school. Sometimes we would just sit in the dark quietly, looking at the water and the creeping lights of boats slowly moving across it. Nothing much mattered while we sat there on the shore, not even the impending change that was to occur after we graduated from high school.

One time my friend Lance and I drove his car off the gravel road that circles Morse Park and Beach and parked it near the seawall of the reservoir, opened up the doors and trunk, and sat in a couple of lawn chairs listening to loud music. Not talking much, just listening and feeling the quiet energy of the lake as it rested. This was just a few weeks after Lance got arrested here at Morse Park for minor possession of alcohol. The beer was in my trunk, and when an anonymous party (we are supposing some fishermen, angry that we invaded their place of escape) called the cops, they searched my car and found the cooler of booze. I was the designated driver for the evening and didn’t plan on drinking, but if Lance hadn’t taken the blame, I would have gone to jail because the bottles of beer were found in my trunk. Instead, Lance told the cops the beer was his, and though several others planned on drinking, no one else spoke up in the presence of the cops and Lance in cuffs. We had to bail Lance out of jail that night, but we ended up coming back to the lake to watch the sun rise up over it. That was a long night, the longest night of the summer, beginning and ending at Morse Park and Beach.

To a group of graduating high school seniors, the lake held no more importance than the intangible future. It was a place where we dreamed and supposed, wished and pleaded that there was something great that lay ahead of us outside of our dragging existence in this sprawling suburb. The lake was a place of peaceful relaxation, turmoil and regret, male and female bonding, and substance use: all activities exemplary of high school life. Now, when I visit Morse Park and Beach several years after leaving Noblesville, I walk the seawall both fond and disdainful of the time I spent here doing not much of anything except living out my adolescent life in this town, longing for something with greater significance, but unsure of the possibilities.

by Ryan Wilcox