Clear Lake, California….isn’t.

Think that might be a misleading closeup?   Okay, here:

So I’d like to invite our readers to come up with more apt names which I can submit to Lake County Officials in an attempt to bring just a little speck of truth to advertising.

I’ll kick it off.

Witch’s Footbath.

Okay, your turn.

Here’s what happened: I was driving to the lake from our vacation rental house with my eleven year old son Gabriel and his friend Tomas in the back seat when I got the panicky cell phone call from my wife.

“Don’t go in the water!  It’s got bacteria.  It says you can get rashes and respiratory problems.”

Ah.  Right.  Rashes and bad bacteria.

Our vacation had officially reached its high point.

And did I mention that my wife’s phone call came a day too late?

We had been to this exact same spot the day before, and I, as well as Gabriel and Tomas, and my older son Rafael and his friend Alex, inexplicably chose to swim in the fetid funk.  We drove all the way up here – hell, we were gonna fun in the lake no matter what!!!

I swear to God, I’m not making this up, my right eye itched like crazy that night.

Still I took the boys to the water, only this time we left the inner tube in the car, and instead, I stood on the sweltering, inhospitable shoreline and watched for about half an hour, brushing away gnats and wiping the sweat from my forehead, as Gabriel and Tomas attempted to fish (not that I would’ve let anything that came out of that water touch their lips).

take your pick: warmish green slime or blistering rocks.

I can’t say with certainty that it was the bacteria that made my eye itch.  Might just as easily have been the mercury contamination from nearby Sulphur Bank Mercury Mine, declared a Superfund site in the early 1990’s.  To this day, the Department of Fish and Game “recommends that women of childbearing age and their children limit their consumption of fish from Clear Lake.”

“…recommends…” “…limit their consumption”…???

C’mon, feds, stop waffling and just say it straight: don’t eat the fucking fish from that gooey swamp!!   The lawsuit from the Lake County Tourism Board will be chump change compared to what you’re gonna pay out when a flipper baby pops out of a hapless mom who made the mistake of eating some of that famous Clear Lake bass.

Guess this little guy didn't get the memo about keeping the hell out of Clear Lake.

Or, or, or… maybe it was residue of all the dichloro diphenyl dichlorethane (DDD) dumped into the lake in the 1950’s to control the gnat population that made me itchy.

Pre DDD, “Clear” Lake was so infested with gnats that visitors wore kerchiefs over their faces to avoid inhaling them, and piles of gnat corpses below street lights grew so big they were mistaken for dirty clumps of snow.

None of this mentioned in the vacation lit, of course.   It only came to light with a little googling after the sight – and smell (my older son Rafael likened it to a ripe, overfull outhouse) – of the place, drove us back indoors.

Everyone knows you throw your trash INTO the abandoned tire, not next to it. Manners, people, manners!

We cut our vacation short by a day (which was still a day too long), drove home, kissed the bay area asphalt, and are still checking our kids for weird rashes.

I say, leave this shit hole to the gnats.

“Shit Hole.” Hmm.  I like that.   Perhaps a bit too on-the-nose, but still, it does capture a certain something.

Oh, and “Clear” Lake wasn’t the only bit of false advertising out there.  Here’s what another little burg along the lake bills itself as:

Seriously? Seriously?! If I were Swiss, I'd be pissed.