In the beginning, the narrator says, “I wondered how the time would have marred this

unique, this holy spot.” He lists some details of the scene, then saying, “I was sure
that the tarred road would have found it out, and I wondered in what other ways it
would be isolated,” which is followed by several clearly illustrated memories. And
the passages go on. “I was right about the tar: it led to within half a mile of the
shore,” he says, observes the surroundings, and thus concludes, “I could tell that it
was going to be pretty much the same I had been before.” By continuously telling
how he remembers the detailed picture of the past lake, the narrator creates an
atmosphere of nostalgia. After showing so many memories, the narrator starts to
confuse the presence with the past. “I began to sustain the illusion that he (the
narrator’s son) was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father,”
says the narrator, and he suggests that he “seem to be living a dual existence”. Later
on, when he is fishing with his son and sees the dragonfly, he sighs, “It was the
arrival of this fly that convinced me beyond any doubt that everything was as it
always had been, that the years were a mirage and that there had been no years,” and
also “There had been no years between the ducking of this dragonfly and the other
one – the one that was part of memory.” Later, when the narrator and his son go to
dinner in the nearby farmhouse, he finds that “the waitresses were the same country
girls, there having been no years, only the illusion of it as in a dropped curtain – the
waitresses were still fifteen; their hair had been washed, that was the only difference
– they had been to the movies and seen the pretty girls with the clean hair.” The
narrator consistently says that there had been no years, emphasizing that this camping
trip is sort of a shadow of the one in the narrator’s childhood with his father,
displaying a strong sense of timelessness.
As the description goes on, however, there is something different and, according to
the narrator, “break the illusion and set the years moving,” which is the sound of the
outboard motors. In the narrator’s childhood, the motors were few and far away and
“the noise they made was a sedative, an ingredient of summer sleep,” he says. But in
the presence, he says, “in the daytime, in the hot mornings, these motors made a
petulant, irritable sound; at night, in the still evening when the afterglow lit the water,
they whined about one’s ears like mosquitoes.” From a reader’s perspective, I would
say that this paragraph of the motors cut off the flow of the whole article, making us
the readers temporarily jump back to the reality from the dreamy illusion created by
the narrator, which could probably be regarded as a tension.