It’s fall already. Where did the summer go? The last two months have flown by – what have I been doing that I couldn’t stop and record a thought or two? The other day I took out my little black notebook to jot down the name of a book, and found pages of notes I’d scribbled reminding myself to remember…
In August we went up to The Island in Maine, my dad, Den and I. The Island is a summer camp that has been in our family since the turn of the century, built by my great-grandfather. It’s one hundred years old this year. It sits on East Grand Lake in Forest City, Maine. Too far north to become a tourist resort, each visit is a walk back in to time, amazing how little has changed over ten, twenty, a hundred years. The boulders, the trees that frame the shoreline, the evening sunsets – always the same. Some things do change a little: the black-eyed-susans outside the kitchen window are gone – a little pine tree sprang up in their spot; the hammock tree came down in a storm. But pretty much everything else is just as we last left it.
Den and I were up for a weekend last year, but before that I hadn’t been up to the island since the summer before I started college. That was the last year my grandparents made it up too. I spent that summer reading and sulking in my teenage way – it didn’t occur to me that I should be savoring the end of something special. For years after I ached to be back at the island with my parents and grandparents. But returning this summer – after thirteen years – my dad and Dennis and I began to lay the ground for a new era. This is why I live in New England – so I would never be far from our island.
Opening camp always begins with a day spent sweeping batshit from the surfaces of everything. Unshuttering the windows. Uncovering the furniture, moving tables and chairs back outside to the porch. Hunting down wicks for the kerosene lamps. Firing up the gas fridge.
Our island has no electricity or plumbing. The kitchen features a green pitcher pump, a gas hotplate, a wood stove (in which my grandmother used to bake her legendary blueberry pies), a “modern” gas refrigerator, a gas light fixture. In the living room is the obligatory trophy deer head mounted above my grampa’s desk. My grandmother always hated that deer head, but for some reason it’s still there. The desk had originally been an organ, brought over by my great-grandparents in their big boat, the Green Dragon. At some point the organ rotted and was converted to a desk. We still have an outhouse, use of which is politely referred to as “going down the lane.” There is discussion of replacing the outhouse with a biological toilet, but I am steadfastly opposed to this modernization. The outhouse was good enough for Grammy, I say. We take our baths in the cold, cold lake – with ivory soap, because it floats – and then run back to warm ourselves by the fire. As a child I used to huddle shivering and blue in the green rocking chair by the wood stove after a cold morning dip, chattering to my grandmother over a mug of Campbell’s instant chicken noodle cup-a-soup.
My dad slept on the balcony watching the stars. This is where my grandparents used to sleep – my grampa in his iron bed and my grammy swaying in her hammock. Every morning my grandfather would rise early and make my grandmother breakfast in bed. As his eyesight declined it took longer and longer for breakfast to arrive, and my grandmother would be trapped in bed long into the morning. As a child I used to scramble upstairs and swing with her in her hammock while she waited for breakfast.
Den and I slept in the tall, sturdy bed my great-grandfather built. The head- and footboards are made up of crisscrossed poles of cherry logs, papery bark peeling along the edges, but still amazingly intact just as when he and my great-grandmother slept in it a century ago. We went to sleep at night to the sound of the restless black lake flinging itself up against the boulders. Sometimes our lake is remarkably still – the surface smooth as glass and crystal clear. But not this year. All night and all day we heard the lake beating up against the rocks, rhythmic and constant like breath. If you look out the window at the right hour during the night you can see the moon shining through the pines and casting a golden path across the lake.
You awaken in the morning to the call of the loons, the lake still lapping steadily at the shore, the sky pink, warming from the east, air chilled enough to beckon a fire. The loons call their mournful call: “where arrrre yooou?” And another answers back: “heeere I am. Here I am.” Sometimes the loons sound like they’re laughing. “Still laughing at Katy King’s dirty joke,” Sam Brown used to say. Nearly twenty years ago it must have been since Sam visited us at the camp, the same year that my friend Katy King from the mainland stayed with us on the island. The joke wasn’t that dirty – or that funny – it just shocked the adults to hear it come from a ten-year-old’s mouth: what do you call the sweat between Dolly Parton’s boobs? (answer: mountain dew). Raised eyebrows and embarrassed laughs – Katy cracked herself up – and then the loons joined in and Sam said “they’re laughing at Katy’s dirty joke.” There aren’t as many loons as there used to be. Used to hear them all day long. They say it’s because of the acid rain – it weakens the shells of the eggs.
On the morning of our last day at the island, I woke up with the sunrise and sat in bed writing these notes to myself in my little notebook with a nub of pencil I’d found (from my grandfather’s last crossword puzzles). The sky was pink. The pines along the shoreline were still dark silhouettes. As the sun rose across the sky, it shimmered down on the lake’s ripples like diamonds. The water was so clear you could see the rocks on the bottom standing on the balcony. This place is heaven to me. The souls of my grammy and grampa live here. The soul of my father’s childhood, and of mine. This is the real pace of time, not the hyperspeed clock of city life.
We closed up the camp. Shuttered the windows, covered the furniture. Tucked away the linens. Locked down the food items. Dragged our bags down to the rocks and waited in the sun for my dad to come around with the boat. As my dad came into view, a cheesy image came to mind: when my dad shows up in heaven, he’ll arrive just like this – driving an old outboard motorboat, motor whining, bumping up and down on the choppy water, hair blown back, squinting in the sun, East Grand Lake a glistening expanse of blue and diamonds all around him.
