JULY 5, 2021 – When I stand at the end of our dock on a clear night, I see a gazillion stars overhead—many, light years away. I also see dozens of lights on the opposite shore. From my perspective, the various magnitudes of shore lights are indistinguishable from the celestial ones.
Yesterday evening we took a sunset cruise aboard our pontoon. The lake had been windswept all day, producing an infinite armada of whitecaps pushing inexorably across the surface. As the sun slid toward the horizon late in the day, the wind diminished and whitecaps vanished. We headed for what I call the Barbary Coast—the south shore, where lights are most visible from our northwest shoreline.
On my charts the Barbary Coast is called “Northwoods Beach,” a misnomer harking back to the days of Florida swampland sales. Some “clever” real estate huckster thought he could fool city slickers into buying lots with 50-foot-high banks crowded with pine if, in the flyer, there was the promise of a “beach.”
As we crossed the lake, the sun’s horizontal rays lit up the Barbary Coast, highlighting trees—so much bigger now than when I first wondered about the shores beyond our own. But as we approached the shore basking in sunlight, our shoreline grew dark, mysterious, and anonymous.
Two hundred feet from the foreign shore, I turned hard to starboard and reduced our speed. As the sun slipped behind a line of clouds hanging above the western horizon, we steamed quietly along the Barbary Coast. Its anonymity dissipated. Through the trees we saw cabins—big, small, nondescript, distinctive—with porch lights aglow. Remarkable staircase arrangements came into view—and dock set-ups, boat lifts, and vessels (mostly pontoons). People appeared walking their grounds, placing wood on campfires, and . . . lighting small fireworks. A pontoon full of local cruisers approached slowly and quietly except for the low hum of their engine and water gurgling along their course. The locals waved. We waved in return.
As darkness descended I turned north toward the outline of our dark, distant shore. The Red Cabin—even in broad daylight, invisible behind the shoreline trees—stands at the west end. By the contour of the forest line and sentinel pine, silhouetted against fading light, I knew precisely what course to hold.
Before our departure my wife had turned on the yard light to illuminate the way from dock to cabin upon our return. Hidden by trees until we were now farther along, the light shone like a beacon . . . or like our planet as it shines from the neighborhood of . . . Mars . . . or as our “neck of the woods” appears at night from the Barbary Coast.
Upon landing, all the details of our world returned to view, a place with which the people aboard our vessel are intimately familiar—as familiar to us as it is unfamiliar to the residents of the Barbary Coast.
I thought about earth—humanity’s home, yet a mere point of light among the stars.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
