I have never suffered solitude.
My mom and her sisters own a small cabin with
a sloping tin roof in far northern Idaho that sits just into the pines off the
shore of Priest Lake. It’s a log cabin, built by a friend of my grandfather,
which my grandfather later purchased himself. By floating logs down the lake in
his spare time, he also built a three-room bunkhouse and a shed. It’s been
around for fifty years now in my family. It’s history, and I’ve been going
there every year of all of my life.
My parents have driven up there so many
times now that I nearly know the route from Logan Utah up to the cabin by
heart. And after six hundred miles, the first glimpse of the blue water through
the dense pines is always a relief. The dirt road crunches under the massive
Dodge Ram van we’ve always driven on this trip; built in the 80s, it almost
seems possible that it will keep running up to the end of the world. The gravel
road ends, and the last twenty feet are paved in pine needles.
I have never been to a place more
peaceful. All of nature there is tangled up in brush and undergrowth and
thousands of pines all striving for the same sun. But there are a few open places.
Those are what you look for when you search for huckleberries, the spaces in
the trees, especially where the logging trucks have come and gone, carting off
the forests. It can be terrifying sometimes to drive up their roads, potholed
almost to the point of not being a road. But the berries are worth it. Intensely
tart, they taste like the air under the trees, high ground and the color of the
dry grass growing around them. Some years we’ve picked nearly twelve gallons.
Storms on the Lake are breathtaking.
Sometimes you can see dark clouds forming ahead of time for days, shadowing the
gray-blue water. Then again, sometimes they wake you by surprise, smashing the
quiet in rolls of thunder. Rain pours over the tin roofs of the cabin and
bunkhouse, snare drums keeping time from stopping. One year, waves fought with
the long wooden dock, attempting to capture and capsize it, immense waves
crashing past the rocking dock and raising the waterline on the beach by
several feet. But the dock didn’t break. It’s Grandfather’s work, built
stronger by his sons-in-law.
It would be hard to find a place where you
can see more stars. The darkness makes slowly makes you aware that there are
stars behind the brighter ones, and galaxies beyond those. I sat out on the end
of the dock with my cousin, and we talked and watched for shooting stars. The
water was completely dark, and when I dipped my hand in, I couldn’t even tell
it was there. It slid through my fingers like the sky itself.
Before one storm, I took our small
grass-green outboard out onto the Lake with my brother and a friend, and we
soaked ourselves sliding up and down the whitecaps caused by the wind. We took
turns driving, tried bouncing the boat off the waves. Sometimes it seemed like
we were about to capsize, adrenaline rushing into our veins. But boats are
stable; they don’t flip so easily. We fought our way back to the cabin, went in
for dinner.
I
say I haven’t suffered solitude, because I have always, even on a dock with my
cousin, felt the stillness and the detachedness that being in the midst of the
pine trees away from the rest of the world brings. Sitting under the midnight
sky, nothing from outside ever really seems to be real. Sitting on a log makes
you aware of how still all things are. I have never suffered solitude––I quite
enjoy it.
