The closest the Cable sisters can get to home these days is by floating above it in a boat. This is how they spent the third Sunday in May, reminiscing about what lay beneath Fontana Lake back when this North Carolina land was a spring-fed family farm ringed by mountains. “Our house sat right out here and under the water about forty or fifty feet deep,” said Helen Cable Vance, pointing over the edge of a twenty-four-passenger pontoon boat to the rippled water’s surface, where a brown log house with a red-shingled roof once stood. It was a drizzly morning, and the shore, one hundred yards away, was deep green, punctuated by the round white poof balls of the mountain laurels in bloom. “In my mind’s eye, I can see the potato field right behind the house,” Helen said. “I can see the apple trees, and I can see the barn and the cattle and the crib.”

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