This is the first of my Substack ruminations, which, for now I’m calling “JourneyCasts”—a variant of “Journey Quest”—the “cast” suggesting my love of casting fly lines to catch fish, as I will be working to catch something more abstract here…. They grow out of thirty plus years of teaching writing and literature at mostly the college level, my last 10 years at a small, private high school. They will cover a broad range of things I have loved and contemplated in my life including, in no particular order/ranking: the outdoors, inspired in the last few years by acquiring a small, off-grid cabin (lake-access only) in my beloved Adirondack Mountains, fly fishing and tying my own flies, playing guitar (mostly classical these days), the writing of Ernest Hemingway, bicycling (gravel, road and some mountain bike), writing poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction….
Let me start with my small cabin, since upon finding a way to buy it a few years ago, it has been so central to reshaping the way I envision and live my life. I can thank COVID, as I think many of us can, for lighting the match. As I fast approached 60, the chances of me making it to 70, or 65 even, seemed to be diminishing.
And there was the cabin on Zillow, a lovely, small, hand-built structure on a small, pristine lake, an acre of land backing up to hundreds of thousands of acres of Adirondack wilderness. A humble solar system provided lights. An LP gas fridge and stove and composting waste system (more on that to come!) gave you almost all the amenities of home. It was freshly painted, one image showing lovely painted yellow sunbeams starting from the back corner and reaching out on two sides along the deep, brown clapboards. A new woodshed full to the brim with 3-4 cords of dried, split logs, another storage shed, an aluminum dock reaching out into the lake, a deck with two orange, plastic Adirondack chairs. The description and images haunted me, and my wife convinced me to call, though I couldn’t fathom finding a way to purchase a second property on our salaries, especially with our youngest child about to attend college.
After fighting my way through several realtors, I finally found the owner’s number on a different website, and she answered on the first ring. Her voice was welcoming, alive with a kind of wonder—the same energy that somehow emanated from the images and description of the property. “Come and look,” she implored me. And so we came north on a cool, June day, the first summer of the pandemic and were met by a man in a Prius, waiting for us, to guide us in to where his 12’ aluminum boat was waiting to ferry us across the lake to the property. He, like his wife, whom I spoke with, was full of life, chatting continuously in a northern Vermont, French Canadian lilt (he was from Canada and lived in Vermont for many years). He had built the cabin in the 70s. He and his wife lived here now from May-November, from the last to the first snowflakes of the seasons. They loved it here and had worked hard to keep the cabin neat as a pin, always freshly painted, the small clearing free of the ever-impending forest.
We took a walk behind the cabin to a nearby beaver pond, and I became equally enamored of three things—the lake with its eerily singing loons and layers of mountains in the distance, the welcoming cabin in its small clearing above the lake, and the “lovely, dark and deep” woods Frost would have stopped to ponder on any evening.
After lots of fuzzy math and refinancing our main home, magically, unfathomably, it would be ours. While we waited for lawyers to argue over boundary lines and other legal annoyances, we were invited to visit again to get a feel for the place, and my wife and I decided to hike in around the edge of the lake on a buggy, early-July afternoon, following the often swampy snowmobile trails. We arrived sweaty and tired and were welcomed with a hearty stew, a fire in the outside fireplace. We pitched our tent on the deck right above the water, slept to the loon calls, and woke to the fire going again and eggs and bacon and hot coffee awaiting us.
I give some of the details of purchasing the property because they are all somehow an essential part of its draw and power for me. It’s rare that you get to know the people you purchase anything from these days, and having gotten to know them briefly—and I still send them pictures of particularly lovely sunrises, big fish, a striking mushroom—seems a part of the magic of this place. Not only is it a remarkable refuge on the edge of the wilderness, it is also a place built by warm, exceptional people—and we are carrying that torch, and hopefully, one day in the not too distant future our children will continue to carry it forward into new generations.
In future “newsletters” I plan to return to writing about our cabin and the Adirondacks: its hundreds of hike/portage-in access only lakes and ponds, small and “high” peaks, endless gravel biking routes, the utterly untamed forest our property abuts (walk due west from our back “yard,” and you won’t hit a paved, public road for 60 miles), fly fishing on lakes and ponds where I see no one else, and the fish are abundant, eager to strike my homemade concoctions of foam and fur and feathers….
Such an inviting place and an ideal hub to cultivate your writing. I am not a nature person and yet with your description it really sounds perfect. Look forward to reading more of you entries!
A lovely description of a very important moment in your life; acquiring a lakeside cabin in the deep woods carries a weight of importance greater perhaps than the cabin itself… Looking forward to reading your musings on myriad subjects, Arnie:)