Opening
“A story draws on relationships in the exterior landscape and projects them onto the interior landscape. The purpose of storytelling is to achieve harmony between the two landscapes…Inherent in story is the power to reorder a state of psychological confusion through contact with the pervasive truth of those relationships we call the land.”
Barry Lopez, “Landscape and Narrative.”
We drive north, watch the car temperature gauge fall into the low 60s. The gas pedal requires increased pressure as we climb into first the foothills of the Adirondacks then turn off the highway and curve up and up into the southern tier of the high peaks. When we finally arrive, we find our our old faithful, 14-foot aluminum boat where it has lain all winter long, flip her over, load up, and head across. Its motor lies in storage in my shed on the other side, so I row, weighed down with a new solar panel and battery, cooler, food for a few days, my wife trying to keep Charlie, our mega-high-energy Gordon Setter from getting in the way of my uneven strokes, the brisk north wind constantly pulling the boat toward it so I only pull with both oars every third stroke to keep her straight, my wife navigating, “more to your right, more, more.” About halfway across, I pause and look over my shoulder at the rounded hills on the other side, behind our cabin, that look like someone lying on their side. To my right, looking southeast, are still-larger mountains, and beyond these, but not visible, the high peaks. I’m struck with the sensation of being held by this place, these mountains lakes, hills, embraced, now mid-lake, the wind pushing us back the way we came—and just then a loon calling out.
We have come to open the cabin for the year—put the docks in, connect water lines, add new lower unit oil to the trusty 9.9hp. Mercury outboard and haul her from the shed down to the boat, ready for another summer of carrying us to and from the other side. Soon after arriving, we start right in, emptying the boat, lugging everything up the hill from the shore to the cabin. Charlie dashes wildly through the woods, finds a stinky vernal pool to roll around in, dashes in and out of the shallows along the shore—outwardly, unabashedly thrilled to be here again. If I could do what he were doing, I would.
I put on waders and wheel the first, larger section of dock down the bank and out into the lake, the water shockingly cold even in my insulated waders. We carry the second section down, in, try to remember how everything fits together. I am taking it extra slow. Last year I slipped and fell backwards and got wedged between dock sections, frigid water pouring in over the tops of the waders. This year is uneventful, and I even use a level to get things just right. It’s my third time now putting the docks in, and I’m finally figuring it out. When the dock is done, the boat tied alongside in its familiar place, and I can walk out and sit on the bench at the end and look south across the surface, see the edge of Blue Mountain now in the southern distance, I again feel the sensation of this landscape holding me, steadying me in its palms.
Later, exhausted, my wife in bed, a barred owl starts hoo-hooing nearby, and soon another joins in, then another. I walk out in the dark, the sky endless pinpricks of stars, the dim wash of the milky way just visible. The owls move closer. I walk out into the woods, and now they are just above me, two, now three, maybe four “hoot owls” bellowing out a call and response. I have heard lone owls before, nearby, calling out, and then in the distance across the lake an answer, but nothing like this. At first it seems as if they are involved in a deadly serious conversation, but after listening for some time, it’s more as if I am witnessing something more serious, a ceremony even, a preacher calling out, the congregation responding. Then I know they are speaking to me as well, telling me something urgent, necessary, true.
Waking into the dappled reflections of sun against lake water on the far wall of our bedroom, Charlie nestled warm in the crook of my leg, a loon sounding off in the windless-still early morning, I think of Barry Lopez’s essay “Landscape and Narrative.” The essay starts with a remarkable and true story of a wolverine attacking a hunter who had been tracking him for days, recalls Native American healing ceremonies, and subtly, steadily builds toward a dazzling epiphany—that “exterior landscapes” project onto our “interior” landscapes, that places evoked in good stories, both fictional and nonfictional, create “landscapes” that speak to something deep inside of us…. There is plenty more to say about that fine essay, but I was thinking about the sounds and smells of this place, the visions of hills, mountains, our cabin held between the ever-present lake on one side, the far reach of wilderness on the other—and how now that it is “opened,” ready to be lived in again for another summer and fall, this exterior landscape will grow ever deeper into my interior, and what is being communicated here is surely, as Lopez writes, “something alive and unpronounceable.”
*All photos by the author.
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