The Beach Lake and the Backyard Lake

The concession building at School Section Lake is fieldstone, laid by hands that are gone now, and it has outlasted every plastic thing the county has bolted up around it since. That’s the first thing you clock walking down to the water. Not the beach. The building.

Then the beach. Real sand, a long shallow shelf of it, running out into 126 acres of lake that bottoms out at 33 feet somewhere in the middle you will never swim to. School Section is an all-sports lake — a Michigan bureaucrat’s way of saying somebody’s nephew will open up a pontoon at two in the afternoon and you’ll feel the wake come through the swim rope twenty minutes later. Fine. The bottom is soft. The water in July sits at the temperature of a lake that’s been cooking in the sun since May, warm on the top foot and a cold thumb of spring underneath if you kick down for it. Kids don’t kick down for it.

The park is 86 acres, run by Mecosta County Parks, which owns the whole east side of the lake and has for longer than the campground’s been full. Call the office and a person answers — (231) 972-7450, not a menu. There are 162 modern campsites back in the trees and five camp-cabins for people who want the tent idea without the tent. A one-room schoolhouse still stands on the grounds, and the county still runs summer programs out of it, which is either heritage or the honest use of a building nobody could bring themselves to knock down. Both, probably. There’s disc golf — nine wooden poles staked across an open field, no chains, no baskets, the kind you played before the sport got serious. A ballfield going back to weeds by August.

The name is a receipt. In the old survey grid, section sixteen of every township got set aside — its land, or the lease money off it, meant to fund the local school. This water sat in one of those sections. So the lake is named for a nineteenth-century tax scheme, and nobody wading out past the rope has ever once thought about that, and why would they.

The other one

Round Lake is the closer of the two if you’re staying on our side of things — not fifteen minutes from the homes, and for some of them a good deal less than that. It’s the runt of the Tri-Lakes, the chain that ties Lake Mecosta and Blue Lake together with Round Lake through channels you can idle a boat down. Seven hundred acres of spring-fed water between the three. Round is the smallest slice of it. It’s also the deep one — 45 feet down at the hole, deeper on average than either of its bigger siblings, cold at the bottom the way the beach lake only pretends to be.

Loons work it. Swans. A great blue heron standing in the shallows, running its long patient con on the bluegill. Bass, pike, panfish. Enough for anybody with a bobber and an afternoon to throw away. The difference between the two lakes is the difference between a beach and a backyard — School Section is where you go, where you drive and park and keep half an eye on other people’s kids. Round is where you already are, if you’re on it. The dock is the amenity. The water comes up colder than you’re braced for and clearer than the beach lake, because 45 feet of spring doesn’t warm the way a sand shelf does. You’ll swear it off in June. You’ll be in it by the middle of July.

What the water’s like, both of them, since that’s the real question. Tea-colored at the margins — tea being the polite word for a hundred years of oak and pine breaking down into the shallows. Clear enough to see your own feet in four feet of it. Warm on top and honest underneath. It smells like a Michigan lake, which is to say faintly of fish, two-stroke, and something green and mineral coming off the weed beds that you stop registering by the second morning and miss for a week after you leave.

The beach is a summer operation — the swim season is short here, and the park runs seasonal, so the concession window is shuttered and the rental canoes are chained up under tarps by the time the color turns. Come for the swimming while the swimming’s good. July and the first three weeks of August. After that the water’s a dare, and Round Lake, being the deep one, is the last to give the warmth back.

Getting there is the easy part and the sign is the hard part. The turn for the park comes up small in a stand of trees, and the county road is happy to keep going without you if you’re watching the GPS instead of the shoulder. Overshoot it. Come back — everybody does it once. If you’re weighing where to put a week of this, the rest of what Mecosta is and isn’t lives on the town page.

The launch ramp is slick. Bring water shoes.