MAY 31, 2024 – What light was filtering through the thick overcast was now fading, and as I walked along the woodland path, I mistook the sound of rain—which I did not feel, being well-attired against mosquitoes—for wind until the shining leaves moved not in concert but individually, like a sea of uncoordinated bobble-heads plunked on the noggin by heavenly tears.
I marveled at how verdant this world had become since my last visit here a fortnight ago. Tregården—the “tree garden” that occupies the acreage that slopes upward starting about 100 back from the lakeshore is in full growth mode. After the devastating winter of 2022-23, I’d been disheartened by the damage to so many of the white pine saplings I’d planted six years before. But now, with very few exceptions (trees snapped in half by that winter’s snow load), the pine that had been bent to the ground in the shape of upside-down U’s have straightened up. Moreover, the winter and early spring drought has been broken. Already the young pine have produced promising shoots, giving me hope that the adolescents will add a good two or three feet of growth this season. Up in the highlands, meanwhile, the Norway seedlings that had “volunteered” with such prolixity four years ago are preparing for a major growth spurt. I can easily imagine them in another five, 10, 20, 50 years, as they continually alter the aspect of what I call “our” woods but in truth belong to Mother Earth, as they always have and always will.
I would’ve missed this stroll had I followed through on my plan to drive back “to the cities” this afternoon. With the onset of cold symptoms, I thought it best to self-quarantine up here for a few days. After pushing myself physically too hard earlier this week, I jumped off the treadmill and adopted a far slower, more restful pace.
My circuitous wanderings led to the place of Zen (the newly installed old dock and boat lift). I boarded the pontoon to make an entry in the ship log, which I’d neglected to do after my brief excursion yesterday evening at sunset.
To my horror, I discovered the compartment where the log is stored had been flooded by rainwater, since the lift installers has not yet put the lift cover in place. Although the blue ink had bled through the sodden pages, with painstaking effort the past three years of entries—plus the first of this season on May 15—could be deciphered and rewritten into a “recovery log,” should I be so ambitious (or compulsive) to make the attempt.
At first I was devastated much in the way of a homeowner who returns to a flooded house and finds the old guestbook with the precious names and remarks of years of visitors, floating across the threshold of the front entryway. My log entries are a pleasant ritual. At the end of each voyage and after crew and passengers have disembarked, I pull out the log, enter the date and time of the cruise and describe its highlights—who was aboard, what part of the lake we toured, how much fuel was consumed, weather and water conditions, and any notable sights or sightings. Now all my careful writings have been blurred in a soggy book decorated with mildew.
I sighed over the loss and soon moved on. Is it not the nature of things, I thought—not to mention the nature of nature—to lack permanence? Sure, some things—rocks for instance—are in this world for the long haul, but even rocks are susceptible to change from the irresistible forces of water, temperature, a quarryman’s jack-hammer, and a sculptor’s chisel. And lord knows that the woods in which I find such welcome solitude are continually breathing, living, dying, decaying, rejuvenating, with no greater predictability than the incertitude that governs humanity.
I laughed at my naïve attempt to record for posterity the banal details of trips aboard our pontoon boat. In that moment of introspection when I held the rain-soaked ship’s log, I asked myself: Would I rather have lived in the days of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, when nothing changed for thousands of years and armies of slaves spent their blood, sweat, and tears building . . . a pyramid (or two or three) that would stand for many millennia more? Of course not. I’d much prefer the dynamism of the woods and weather that surround me here and now in this green mansion—green because of the rains that made the ink run across the pages of the Ship Log.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
