For what could the lake in "Once More to the Lake" by E.B. White be a metaphor? What are some examples from the text to support this?

In this essay E.B. White returns with his son to the same camp by a lake where he spent his own childhood summers with his family.  The lake has not changed much, nor has the quality of the vacationers’ enjoyment of it.  But, White realizes, while the people remain essentially the same, little details of society are changing.

The human reflexes are the same as always – going out in the boat in the morning, careful not to disturb the silence; going to the farmer’s house for dinner; buying refreshments in the store; the impulse to swim in the rain.  The only differences are in the details – outboard motors have replaced the quieter inboard models; the variety of local sodas have been reduced to make room for the best-selling Coca-Cola; the road to the lake has been paved.  And yet the lake endures in its natural form.  In this same way, life is absolute; it endures within each new soul, as the old ones age, and despite the additions of new products , the trends and fashions and remodeling of old structures, through time we maintain the same instincts, and the same impulses.

In this way we can say that the lake is a broad metaphor for life – it’s substance does not change, and the roles that get passed from father to son – from generation to generation – do not change.  We can see that in a generation the lake is “fade-proof…the woods unshatterable;” life manifests itself to be the same, as White’s son assumes the same roles White himself once filled as a child.  White uses concrete images to drive this point home – first, listening to his son creeping quietly out of the cabin in the morning as he used to do, he states, “I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father…I seemed to be living a dual existence.”  And again, as they are fishing together that same morning, “I looked at the boy…and it was my hands that held his rod, my eyes watching. I felt dizzy and didn’t know which rod I was at the end of.”  He states later, observing the other summer revelers swimming, strangers assuming the roles of once familiar faces, that “there had been no years.” 

The lake provides the appropriate setting for White to discover this cycle of life – that the roles each of us must take are recycled and handed down, and with the birth of each new generation, those in the one before it are pushed that much closer to death.  This undeniable truth is the perfect note for White to end his essay on – thus, beginning with his own childhood and cycling through his parenthood at the lake, where his own life and his son’s convalesce, he is able finally to pass the torch.  For, speaking of his son he says, “As he buckled the swollen belt suddenly my groin felt the cold chill of death.”  This serves both as a continuation of his own embodiment of his son, feeling what his son feels as the latter pulls on his soaking wet swimming trunks, and as a final admittance of his own growth, as he is transiting across the great sun of life, the background not changing, he himself moving closer to the edge.