DECEMBER 31, 2022 – I arrived here at the Red Cabin yesterday after dark and found no internet service, since our rooftop satellite dish on which we’re dependent for connectivity, was buried under two feet of snow. I pictured myself like an early settler having to “rough it.” That is, still with mobile phone coverage, I anticipated that for the next few days, I’d be resorting to my iPhone keypad to punch out daily blog posts.
But in the modern era, extreme inconvenience (everything’s relative), is the mother of memory. This morning, as I prepared to hunch over my phone and bang out an abbreviated post about why it was abbreviated, I remembered: the phone settings include a “hotspot” function. Voila(!): “Extreme inconvenience” eliminated—along with the prospect of truncated blog posts.
According to my wife’s sensible planning—and in furtherance of the early settler motif—I blazed the trail from city to country. At around sunset today, she and our younger son Byron and his delightful wife, Mylène, will follow my tracks. My delegated mission was to confirm that our long, narrow, twisting drive was passable (it was barely so—our plowman was able to clear only enough to accommodate the width of my car); shovel a path from where the plow had left off to the back steps of the cabin; haul in eleventeen bags, bundles and boxes bursting with supplies enough for re-enactment of the Lewis and Clark Expedition; warm the place up and turn the water system back on; fire up the wood-burning stove for ambience; and flip the switch for exterior, festive lights to welcome our special visitors from “the civilized East.”
A secondary purpose for my independent arrival was to create an interval between Byron and Mylène’s double-masked flight from Hartford to Minneapolis (after a week of sequestration from people) as part of a five-point program to reduce my exposure to viral infections during their visit.
I took full advantage of my post-arrival “alone time”: Having worked down the checklist except for festive lights and wood-burning stove ambience, I embarked on a short skiing expedition on the lake ice along the shore. Through broken clouds, the half-moon, a sailing yacht with spinnaker inflated by cosmic winds, skipped along the western reaches of the winter sky. When I looked toward shore, the cabin—lit from the inside—gave the impression of an illuminated memory. In the memory I saw my forebears, perplexed by such modern essentials as “internet connectivity” and “mobile phone coverage.” By my ancestors’ standards, certainly, I was hardly “roughing it.”
Later in the evening, when I was about to retire, I looked out the bedroom window and saw the moon sailing in the clear and many stars ablaze through the trees along the berm in front of the cabin. I donned a hat, boots, parka and mittens. Without skis I ventured a few meters out onto the frozen lake. Straight ahead of me above the southern horizon, Orion stood as bright as ever, unobstructed and surrounded by a sparkling entourage. Given the mild conditions, I stood there for many minutes, gazing upward and in fresh wonderment. I thought not only of known ancestors but of anonymous ancients; how they too wondered at the same luminous moon, contemplated the same stellar radiance.
Standing alone and quietly in that celestial glow, far from the noise of civilization, I felt my inseparable connection to humanity, past, present and future—and to worlds far distant from our own.
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
