White's storyOnce More to the Lake? is change and continuity. It is about waking up one day and realizing you are not the child you once were, but the father you used to look up to. E.B. White works with this theme by explaining his childhood trips to the lake. Using great detail, the author talks about the first time he ever traveled to the lake:My father rented a camp on a lake in Maine and took us all there for the month of August. We all got ringworm from some kittens and had to rub Pond's Extract on our arms and legs?(53). He goes on to tell that the trip was a success. They continued to go summer after summer.
?I have since become a salt-water man?, (53) says E.B. White. He eventually grew out of spending his summers at the lake. Yet he explains that he misses'the placidity of a lake in the woods?(53). He decides to take along his son,?who had never had any fresh water up his nose and who had only seen lily pads only from the train window?(53). Thus, he takes his son to the lake as his father once did for him. At this point he realizes he is not the child anymore; he is the father. White writes I seemed to be in a dual existence. I would be in the middle of some simple act, I would be saying something, and suddenly it would be not I but my father who was saying the words or making the gesture. It gave me a creepy sensation?(54). Everything felt the same to him as it did when he was a child. He says, The small waves were the same, chucking the rowboat under the chin as we fished at anchor, and the boat was the same boat, the same color green and ribs broken in the same places, and under the floor-boards the same fresh water leavings and debris--the dead hellgrammite, the wisps of moss, the rusty discarded fishhook, the dried blood from yesterday's catch?(54). Walking to the farmhouse for dinner, the father noticed where there had once laid three walking tracks, now there only laid two.
