Water is nature's tranquilizer.
—Diana Vreeland
Perhaps there is no greater excitement than turning into a New England dirt road that leads—after great length, curving violently, dropping and rising like a roller coaster running through a dark curtain of Black Spruce—down to a lake. Stones ricochet off the car, the axle jolts into a rut, and the dust kicks up around the windows until you slow to a crawl.
Then the first band of sapphire, glinting under the sun, appears through the woods.
This first glimpse of the lake is a primal, childhood joy. It comes from a place that was thought to be lost in the anguish of maturity.
* * *
Thus we arrived at our home for the week, a log cabin with window boxes of coral-colored impatiens and tiny American flags. It overlooked the largest private frontage on the entirety of the large lake, a shoulder of land that faced northeast toward the open water and east into a cove, on the other side of which was a trailer campground.
Between the cabin and the water's edge was a descent on an amphitheater of exposed granite and tree roots, across a narrow slip of bog, and past stands of day lilies.
With a glass of wine in my hand, I traversed this many times during the week and can do so now, if I shut my eyes. I still feel the sun's warmth on the moss.
The lap of the water against the rocks kept time like a broken, musical clock.
Ducks tilted on the wakes of the passing boats in groups of four.
Each day, a resident heron departed and returned to a perch on the tip of a rock five feet from the dock, its wings spreading above me, as I swam, like Icarus.
* * *
Behind and above the little cabin, situated on the very crest of the rocky land, was the owner's sprawling, boxy home. Sue was 72 and wore a different baseball cap every day. On the day we arrived, she was wearing one of black felt with a constellation of shiny metal rivets that made her look like a minor entertainer, or the conductor on a scenic railroad.
She walked us through the cabin and the land speaking in what must have been the pentameter of an old play, lines she had memorized long ago.
Her mother had the cabin built in 1953, and in the years following Sue had replaced the roof, repainted and waterproofed the logs, refinished the interior pine walls, and installed a stove where the hearth of the beautiful, wide-open fireplace had been. But her mother's—and her own—paintings still hung in the bedrooms. One particularly successful watercolor of the cabin ("There were more trees then," said Sue) was mounted, regretfully, on the wall behind the toilet—invisible to the user but, perhaps by design, at the perfect perspective for the living areas because the heavy door of the bathroom hung persistently open.
Sue and her husband lived in the cabin until their large home was built. Four years ago she lost him, two weeks after his cancer diagnosis. As she took us onto the old wooden dock and showed us the Belgian block steps, down into the water, that she and her husband had built ("We put them in ourselves and they've stayed that way ever since"), she told us her mother had died, at 101, only two weeks before we arrived.
But there was still Cloe, her Black Lab, and she warned us we'd see them walking down the path to the water in the mornings. One afternoon—evidently rising late—she slipped and fell, and Alan and I ran out in the rain to help. I got my socks soaking wet. But Josh said "No—she'll know we're watching her, and she'll be embarrassed."
It was at that point I realized he knew her—from just two days.
* * *
This was our fifth summer trip together and the boys had been on one of their habitually private walks when Sue gave them a sudden little tour of her house and garden. I pouted at the exclusion and listened with envy to their description.
And they met up again, walking on the road that I never took. Yet I think the encounters were more than propinquity—her gossipy warmth, telling them her life history and showing them her paintings and crafts, confiding her opinion of the campground owner ("An asshole") and her fondness for wine.
I think Sue knew too well the ditch into which I had fallen. Like an animal from the woods that surrounded her, she could smell weakness and injury.
The only thing she said to me, that first day, was You're too young for cataract surgery. She wanted none of me.
My friends, at the leggy, V-neck sweater-y, spiked-hair apex of their lives, their beautiful faces still free of the darker refinements forty would yet bring, were the natural audience for the stories of a septuagenarian artist—a big fish in a small pond, a wealthy woman still walking at a brisk pace with her dog, no fuller through the waist than any film star her age, her bust oddly pert under a sweatshirt, her expression like a Pinochle player on a trick.
I told them to invite her down for our fourth of July burgers and baked beans, but she didn't come.
I told them to invite her down for our fourth of July burgers and baked beans, but she didn't come.
* * *
I didn't like swimming alone in the "pond," as New Englanders insist on calling their lakes. The bottom was weedy and muddy, and the large rock that was the heron's perch attracted schools of big fish within the black chasms between the underwater boulders. Only on Friday, our last day, did I overcome this by floating on a body-length periwinkle blue raft meant for use in pools. Like a deep brown watery terrarium, I didn't want my legs to touch—or encounter—what my eyes could not see.
I preferred canoeing. Using a kayak paddle rather than the usual wooden one, drops of cool water refreshed me as I lifted it from side to side. Callouses developed quickly behind my thumbs.
The pace of the canoe, its quiet caress of the water as I advanced, made me feel like a squaw (lubricated, conveniently, with Bain de Soleil).
I made a point to stop and enjoy the different properties. Most had perfect green lawns running down to the water's edge, punctuated with American flags, jardinieres of petunias, fabric-covered swings, and decks crowned with grills.
But, occasionally, glimpses of an older aesthetic, a hardier sensibility, came through—rustic, miniature cottages with tiny framed windows, painted board walls, and stone chimneys laid out on a chessboard of rhododendrons, rusted metal hammock frames, and the humus of old walnut trees and roses.
One such property had a narrow set of steps set into the stone retaining wall. Shaded by a mimosa tree, it descended into perfectly clean, shallow water with a pebbled bottom. For the second time that week, a part of myself unexpectedly thrilled at the diorama. I paddled past—quietly—again and again.
* * *
I know (and care) nothing about the subject, but I can guess what psychology might have to say about a propensity to tearfulness. Keeping in the calm, objective center of the mind seems to be the only acceptable state, a sort of alert, highly functional banality—the perfect state in which to buy a house, or play a winning game of Scrabble.
Yet, my truest sense is that the jury is still out on those who, like myself, must fight a familiar constriction of the throat, an abrupt, overwhelming vision—if that is the word—of the sad irony in a set of images, or events, as they are casually presented or discovered.
For it is within the story itself, like the million twists of an old Russian novel, that heartbreak resides. For those susceptible to these sudden realizations, set off always by some inconsequential yet profound symbol, the passing of summer into fall, the last hours before a dreaded farewell, or the diminishment of any of the personalities or habitual conditions that compose our lives creates a terrible sympathetic resonance within—a sadness so powerful it is not unlike anxiety.
I prefer to think that a sadder song plays in the minds of some people. It has always played, for them. Since childhood, it was never any other way, and as they mature they learn to jump up and change the record, comically—almost. I have clung to banality, focused my mind on something indifferent or commonplace, just to avoid a profound and terrible sadness. Wrapped up in the images and the story my mind has suddenly created—my talent for descriptive observation destroying me, as it were—I want nothing more than to cry for a very long time.
Diverting it too soon is often a mistake, like passing in a card game too early.
Toward the end of our week on the lake I took to sitting in one of the white plastic lounge chairs that were deposited—I can't say arranged—on a sort of lumber patio near the dock. I had brought with me Under Western Eyes and I was growing frustrated with Conrad's malapropisms, all the while, like a good Literature major, appreciating that he did not learn English until his twenties.
Perhaps there are no more keenly observant moments than when looking up from a book that has, after a spurt of determination, lost one's attention.
Now I saw the two rotted half-barrels, one on either side of me, choked with weeds, that had, in years past, for guests long gone, been filled every summer with flowers. I looked straight ahead to the dock, its brick pylons bowed at a steep angle, its grey boards undulating and treacherous at the seams, the fenders pulling away like candles on melted icing.
This property, one of the largest and oldest established on the lake, depicted in watercolors, lovingly inhabited by a young and fortunate couple, celebrated and maintained, was on its last handful of summers. Sue will never plant in these barrels again, or rake the beach. One morning not too long from now a motorboat's wake—too fast and too close to shore—will take out a section of the dock, and then another.
The rich lady living alone at the top of the hill will sell.
Yet, my truest sense is that the jury is still out on those who, like myself, must fight a familiar constriction of the throat, an abrupt, overwhelming vision—if that is the word—of the sad irony in a set of images, or events, as they are casually presented or discovered.
For it is within the story itself, like the million twists of an old Russian novel, that heartbreak resides. For those susceptible to these sudden realizations, set off always by some inconsequential yet profound symbol, the passing of summer into fall, the last hours before a dreaded farewell, or the diminishment of any of the personalities or habitual conditions that compose our lives creates a terrible sympathetic resonance within—a sadness so powerful it is not unlike anxiety.
I prefer to think that a sadder song plays in the minds of some people. It has always played, for them. Since childhood, it was never any other way, and as they mature they learn to jump up and change the record, comically—almost. I have clung to banality, focused my mind on something indifferent or commonplace, just to avoid a profound and terrible sadness. Wrapped up in the images and the story my mind has suddenly created—my talent for descriptive observation destroying me, as it were—I want nothing more than to cry for a very long time.
Diverting it too soon is often a mistake, like passing in a card game too early.
Toward the end of our week on the lake I took to sitting in one of the white plastic lounge chairs that were deposited—I can't say arranged—on a sort of lumber patio near the dock. I had brought with me Under Western Eyes and I was growing frustrated with Conrad's malapropisms, all the while, like a good Literature major, appreciating that he did not learn English until his twenties.
Perhaps there are no more keenly observant moments than when looking up from a book that has, after a spurt of determination, lost one's attention.
Now I saw the two rotted half-barrels, one on either side of me, choked with weeds, that had, in years past, for guests long gone, been filled every summer with flowers. I looked straight ahead to the dock, its brick pylons bowed at a steep angle, its grey boards undulating and treacherous at the seams, the fenders pulling away like candles on melted icing.
This property, one of the largest and oldest established on the lake, depicted in watercolors, lovingly inhabited by a young and fortunate couple, celebrated and maintained, was on its last handful of summers. Sue will never plant in these barrels again, or rake the beach. One morning not too long from now a motorboat's wake—too fast and too close to shore—will take out a section of the dock, and then another.
The rich lady living alone at the top of the hill will sell.
* * *
Checkout was strictly at 10:00, "unless other arrangements have been made" said the paper tacked up in the kitchen. The penmanship was artsy and clear. At the bottom she signed "Sue and Zoe."
Zoe is still here with her.
Perhaps we'll come back next July, and the same hummingbird will stall like a New York cab at our picnic table, undecided whether to dip his beak in our rosé or a lily.
Perhaps I'll get a tour of Sue's place, next year.
Change the music, please.
Think of something banal.
