preview

Personal Narrative: Life In The City Of Lake Ontario

Decent Essays

I grew up Western New York State, in a rural community located on the south shore of Lake Ontario, roughly between the City of Buffalo and the City of Rochester. The area is known for its formidable weather, especially the snow storms in the winter due to the lake effect. The community has its roots in farming and raising livestock (mostly cows), which continues today though there are more housing developments dotting the landscape these days. My town is home to the world’s biggest apple pie, and is very much like stepping back in time in some respects. The views and practices of the community have changed very little in the past forty years and will be slow to do so given the conservative nature of the public’s opinion, now that I look from …show more content…

The lake side of the house in a shoreline community is considered the “front” of the house versus the street side as most people are used to. My family always owned a sailboat so that was a large source of my “community”, the people and the families who had a boat moored near ours, and a few neighborhood friends. I loved to fish, and continue to today. As a child if I wasn’t fishing in the lake during summer I was swimming, or trying to catch minnows with my butterfly net to fish with. In the winter, we rode snowmobiles on the frozen shores. Being a rural location, hunting and trapping were other activities which I participated in. My father bought me my first BB gun for my tenth birthday, and a shotgun for my sixteenth birthday because I was old enough to have a big game license for deer. I hunted until my early twenty’s.
Transportation modes were bicycle, minibike, then a motocross bike (I raced it), snowmobile, and last was a pickup truck. We lived about ten miles from the nearest town consisting of a blinking yellow traffic light, complete with one drugstore, and one grocery store. It took 45 minutes by bus to get to school. Where did I go? I went to “the big tree”, “the orchard”, the lake at “the end of the bluff” because there really wasn’t anywhere to go without a car, or public

Get Access