If anyone in my area says they’re “going to the lake,” there’s no need to elaborate. We all know it means the Lake of the Ozarks. This sprawling lake in southern Missouri is to the people of Kansas City and St. Louis what the Hamptons are to the people of New York City: a beautiful place to escape the rigors of the city and relax and have fun. Only unlike the Hamptons, you can be total white trash and go to the Lake. In fact, it seems to be especially appealing to that demographic. Also, you have to check the current E. coli levels at the Lake before getting in to ensure there aren’t too many poop germs so you don’t get sick. I’m not sure, but I don’t think that’s a concern at the Hamptons beaches.
I come from a long line of kind-of white trashy people who liked to go camping at a different, smaller, crappier lake in Missouri. Like the Lake of the Ozarks was too boojie for us, which is really saying something. My mother always hated tent-camping there with her in-laws, and we stopped going when I was in middle school. My mom passed her hatred of camping on to me. (Why did humanity even bother evolving if you want to choose to live like a neanderthal for “fun” and go in the woods to squat and pee atop a bed of poison ivy?) So in the last decade or so that I’ve been going to the Lake of the Ozarks with girlfriends or on family vacation, we rent condos. There are some really nice, spacious and affordable ones with lakefront views.
The problem with the condos, however, is that other people are in them. There are the nice retirees who live there most of the time, but there are also the bachelor parties and loud, drunk women from St. Louis who drop the F bomb several times at the pool in front of your kids. On our family vacation last year, I went to the condo below us and walked in the unlocked door of a frat-type party that was keeping our kids awake at 11 p.m. (I knocked first and no one answered. I was annoyed beyond any fear of confrontation, and my husband was being a weenie.) I mustered my best mom guilt and told the bros they were keeping small children from sleeping. Small children that would - no matter how late they stayed up - still awaken between 6:30 and 7 a.m. They quieted down after that. This year, a drunk St. Louis woman in the condo below us was blasting music on her deck and being ridiculously loud well past midnight.
You may ask how I know she was from St. Louis: It was by accent alone. It’s worth another blog to describe the differences between Kansas City and St. Louis (like in St. Louis your value as a human being is largely dependent on which Catholic high school you attended), but we’ll just cover the kind-of whiney St. Louis lilt for now. A large amount of the people I went to college with were St. Louisans, including very close friends, which is where I learned that they say “mom” like “mam.” And discussing one of the interstates that runs through their city, I-44, they pronounce “I-farty-far.” It was that same accent I heard slurring up into our bedroom a couple weeks ago as I tried to sleep, knowing the 6:30-7 a.m. kid wake-up time that awaited me. It stopped after the same lady walked by the next day and heard me talking to the nice, retired couple next-door to us about whether the condo complex had quiet times and how to report violators.
Anyway, the ultimate revenge for all of this is to take your kids on a walk past the offending condos singing songs together as soon as the kids wake up.
But probably my favorite Ozark condo experience ever didn’t involve loud drunk people; it involved a taxidermy conference. Three of my friends and I rented a lovely condo in a really nice resort-type complex for a girls’ weekend. We noticed some weird vehicles parked around, many with taxidermy business markings. We just thought, “Hey, it’s the Ozarks; that crowd would appreciate it here.” Then the next morning, we went to the gym. As we went down the hall at the main clubhouse in our snug little athletic leggings and such, we had to make our way around a large crowd of bearded white guys. Then we saw the signs: it was the registration line for a taxidermy conference. I don’t know what kind of workshops that entails, but I have some guesses:
- The Latest Glass Eye Technology
- Creative Ways to Reuse Innards: You Won’t Believe all the Things You can Make Sausage Out of!
- Recreating a Lifelike Anus
- Holiday Taxidermy: How to Stuff Dead Animals in Festive Poses
And you know what? The taxidermists didn’t throw loud, late-night parties.
The Ozarks is also a place where you don’t have to worry about body-shaming. Some of the largest women wear some of the smallest bathing suits, and the men have no compunction about letting that beer belly out. In fact, many of them enhance their beer bellies while at the Lake.
I’m not a full-on “lake life” person with a boat or jet-ski or lake house or any of that. I know some of those people. But I find lakes generally too gross to actually get in (see aforementioned E. Coli concerns). Disease is generally not a concern at the Ozarks however. In fact, amid some of the greatest transmission rates of the pandemic, we ate at a restaurant there a few weeks ago where not even the staff were wearing masks and the tables were not distanced from each other at all. Were it not for the whiney chorus of “I’m so hungry!” from my kids, we probably would have left. Because up here in Kansas City, we know the ‘rona is everywhere and we act like it.
But the Lake will always be a very nice and beautiful getaway that’s only a three hour-drive from the rigors of city life. Just be prepared for it to be like a summer-long spring break for middle-aged people. I doubt it’s the drug-fueled underworld in the Netflix series that bears its name (which isn’t even filmed in Missouri), unless the drugs we’re talking about are beers like Natural Light. That’s fueling at least 50% of people at the Ozarks on any given day.
