FEBRUARY 7, 2023 – In a hurry, I lugged things that partly define me: in a small backpack, The Overstory, a gift from my oldest sister, and a fresh set of clothes I hadn’t had time to change into; in my right hand, a plastic bag of trash and best set of x-c skis; in my left hand, ski poles and for my next gnome home, a straight poplar pole. I’d already made two cargo trips with the toboggan out to the car. Heading home after a week at the Red Cabin, I wanted to log some miles before sundown. Plus, I was expecting a business call and needed to get past the “hill country,” where reception is sketchy.
The late afternoon sun streamed through the woods along the drive, bringing trees to life, shadow-walking among themselves. As I approached a bend, however, an ancient oak ahead stood still, its girth obscuring its shadow. I heard it say, “What’s your rush, young man?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” I said, “anything about my business, my world.” Indeed. My little business, my little world. Who was I to think I could race the planet, rotating and revolving around the sun?
What is time? Earlier in the day I’d found myself writing to someone, “Statistically, I have three to five years. I hope for more, but the odds are against making it to our [seven-year-old] granddaughter’s high school graduation.” But how long would I have irrespective of a diagnosed disease, I thought, when a deer leaps in front of the car when I’m going 60 . . . or when the lake ice cracks underfoot “before my time”?
I reflected on mortality as I skied along the lakeshore in late morning, spotting amazing phenomena I hadn’t noticed before, though I’d skied, sailed, walked, rowed, kayaked back and forth this way a thousand times. How long had the lichen-covered stumps stood vigil? A hundred years? How much longer will they stand? And the young pines, enjoying their time on stage while the surrounding vegetation is without its foliage. Will they be standing in a hundred, two hundred years? To admire most are living giants—rising from the earth many generations before my own and sure to sway in winds of many generations yet to come.
The sun moved furtively among the clouds, in a game of hide and seek. I pondered this chase between the most permanent fixture in the sky and the most ephemeral. Just then, I saw a photo op—a sharp line of sunlight half a mile away, shooting across the lake. I had to grab my camera quickly to catch the shot, a reminder of how transitory everything is in life. As the day wore on, the sun defeated the clouds. But if the game had truly been hide and seek, paradoxically, weren’t the transitory clouds the winners? Now that they’d disappeared, the sun had no place to hide.
The long life of the sun reminded me of a recent (Zoom) book club session. When climate change became a point of discussion, a member observed fatalistically that as a species, our days are numbered despite our best (or worst) efforts to the contrary. He was dismissive of worries about climate change. His perspective was geologic time. His evidence was irrefutable. My disagreement, in turn, was total. If in his view, three to five million years are nothing, in my reality, three to five are everything.
Before my departure from the Northwoods, I savored further, the surrounding scenery—and my good fortune as a member of the species, however long I’ll be a member; however long we’ll be a species.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
