In the mid 1970s my family, along with a neighbor family, began making the journey from Long Island to a camp in northwestern Maine every July. These trips delighted myself, my father and my brother and thrust my mother into a circle of hell she never anticipated. Not that she didn’t have some degree of fun mostly centered around the deficiencies of the cabin we rented or her encounters with the local wildlife. Skunks in particular. That being said my mom was always a five star hotel kind of person, she viewed the outdoors as a big conspiracy to mess up your hair or deposit muck on your nice shoes. As I grew older I came around to her way of thinking. I’m definitely more of an indoor girl.
Still I treasure the memories of those vacations. At the ripe old age of eight years old to be wet and muddy for a full week, even for a girly girl, was pure bliss. The cabin was steps away from a cold, clear lake that had at its center an uninhabited island with a mountain towering out from the wilderness. There were few animals on the island and it was a pretty long row to get there but the adventure of landing on the small beach and hearing rustling in the trees as chipmunks, squirrels, foxes, and I don’t know what else fled from our noise. To explore that beach and to venture into the dark, cool woods only to flee a few minutes later as the green flies attacked with demonic purpose, they were moments charged with excitement of a kind not available on a typical summer day on suburban Long Island.
One of my fondest memories was my dad taking me out in the rickety row boat early, early in the morning to go fishing. I still enjoy a fishing trip on a lake, the ocean leaves me seasick to the point of death, and that morning as I learned to cut a worm to bait a hook, holding my breath the whole time so as not to appear squeamish and somehow disappoint my father, and sitting in that perfect stillness that was damp and chilly while managing to also be humid and sticky. The water lapping against the boat and that smell of lake heavy in the air. I don’t remember if we talked or just sat and fished but I do remember bringing home my first catch, a brook trout, just barely big enough to keep. I can still call up the feeling of it in my hands while dad unhooked it and then he just looked a me and smiled.
It’s a good memory.
When my twins, now seventeen, were infants we packed the seven kids in the car and made the journey to the same place. The camp we stayed at those many years ago was gone but the one right next to it was still going so my children became familiar with the same views, same lake, same forest and likely the ancestors of those same skunks and bears. We started to arrive every year and when we were packing eight of them up for a week I began to question my sanity but I couldn’t not go because this place, so far from everything that I thought made me happiest gave me such a sense of peace and contentment. It may have been a holdover of happy childhood memories because, honestly, I didn’t have many of them (a long story for another time) or it may have been the complete lack of technology available for miles and miles. No cell towers, no wifi nothing worked. Even the old TVs only got two channels in English and one French Canadian. The radio was mostly French if you could get anything at all. So there we were in the early 2000s totally cut off and listening to the silence most of the day, interrupted only by the voices of my children, splashing and a lot of laughing. Perhaps this was the source of the peace. That and the beautiful landscape. I think when we find that kind of silence and peace we grow a little closer in knowing what we were really created for, not the busyness we think is so important but the silence in which we can truly begin to know each other and our Creator.
It is the place where we were last together as a whole family. A few days after we returned from that lovely spot in the middle of nowhere in 2009 we lost Ryan. His joy in that place is a memory I hold so close, his absolute abandon in being part of this place where nothing stressed him out the way the large, noisy world did everywhere else, his poor brain almost always on overload. Nuerodivergent brains crave peace and aside from singing in church, this was where he was the most happy.
We went back twice after that summer but I could never regain the contentment I had once reveled in. It was shattered because those happy memories could never be added to, never repeated in the same way and everytime I walked out of the cabin door in the early morning mist I was looking for him standing on the floating dock with a fishing pole in his hands singing a hymn and being more fully himself than he ever could be anywhere else. It was heartbreaking and so, selfishly, I stopped planning those trips.
I still look at the old pictures at this time of year, every year and Dave and I occasionally talk about going back just the two of us, to see if we can bury the grief there and just find the joy.
I’d like that.
Leaving me in tears this time Maryellen. All I can think to say is God bless your hearts always … love you