MISQUAH — The Mud Lake Association held its midsummer meeting Thursday in the back room of the Daybreak and delivered, to an audience of two, its annual finding that conditions on the lake are “underrated as ever” — weedy, warm, quiet, and almost entirely free of the boat traffic, jet skis, and weekend noise that trouble the rest of the Chain.

The association has, by long and deliberate tradition, exactly the membership it wants, which is small, and exactly the agenda it wants, which is short. President Dorothy Knutson, who has made the case for Mud Lake as long as anyone can remember and has a binder to prove it, reported a record bluegill count off the south weed bed, “the best frog chorus in three years,” water clear enough “once you understand it’s never going to look like Big Pelican and stop wanting it to,” and “nobody, blessedly, from Big Pelican.” The perennial renaming question — Mud Lake to something more flattering, with “Crystal” and “Mirror” the standing nominees — was raised by the other attendee, tabled by the president, and, as ever, secretly enjoyed by both.

“We don’t actually want more people,” Knutson conceded, gathering her one page of notes and the binder she did not open. “That’s the secret of the whole association, and you can print it. If we cleaned it up and renamed it Crystal Lake we’d have pontoons by August and a waiting list at the landing and I’d have to start locking the gate, and then it would be exactly like every other lake, which is the one thing it has never been. We want the respect. We don’t want the company. There is a difference, and Mud Lake, God love it, is the difference.”

The meeting adjourned in under twenty minutes, which Knutson noted was “about twelve minutes longer than it strictly needed to be, but you don’t get to see Howard but the once a year, so we let it run.” The association will meet again, she said, “when there’s something to report, or next year, whichever is later,” and the two of them stayed for a second cup, which is, she allowed, the real reason anyone keeps an association going at all.