WHY I GIVE My Time to the WLAC

By Erin Barringer, WLAC Finance Committee Member

My favorite place in the world is my family’s cottage, Walloa, in Wildwood Harbor on Walloon Lake. It is the place where I feel relaxed the second that I set foot on the grass, where I can lie on the dock for hours, laughing with family or lost in a good novel, and where I can stare at the handwriting of generations of my family on the wall, measuring their heights alongside mine.

Our cottage was built by my great-great-grandfather in 1902 and has been passed down through generations. I’ve come to Walloon every summer since I was born, making this summer my forty-first! When I was young, I would often come up and spend weeks on end with my grandparents, Henry and Hood Barringer. I cherish our nightly family cheese and cocktail hour on the porch (often joined by neighbors), the rows I took with my grandfather in our family rowboat, waking up early to ski alongside my brother on the flat lake, pulling my cousins tubing while they shriek, and our nightly ritual of watching the sunsets.

Since my early childhood, my father and grandfather instilled in me the importance of helping to preserve and protect the beauty of Walloon Lake. As a child, I would row down to the fresh springs with my grandfather and marvel at how clean (and cold!) the fresh water was coming into our lake. As a teenager, I remember my father working alongside our neighbors, the Shifrins, to donate a portion of land we jointly owned to the WLAC as “Bois LeDuc,” now part of the Wildwood Harbor Nature Corridor. As such, when I was asked to serve on the WLAC Finance Committee last summer, I was thrilled. In addition to my annual donations, it felt like the perfect way to continue to support Walloon Lake and to honor the hard work generations have put in before me to protect my happy place for generations to come!